BOILING FUR

PART 1: COMBRAY

EXPERIMENTAL FILM

Memory as a frayed, static broadcast. A film felt, seen and heard through that interference.

Memory as a frayed, static broadcast. A film felt, seen and heard through that interference.

EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA · COMPOSITING · AI GENERATION

EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA · COMPOSITING · AI GENERATION

BOILING FUR

PART 1: COMBRAY

EXPERIMENTAL FILM

Memory as a frayed, static broadcast. A film felt, seen and heard through that interference.

Memory as a frayed, static broadcast. A film felt, seen and heard through that interference.

EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA · COMPOSITING · AI GENERATION

EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA · COMPOSITING · AI GENERATION

BOILING FUR

PART 1: COMBRAY

EXPERIMENTAL FILM

Memory as a frayed, static broadcast. A film felt, seen and heard through that interference.

Memory as a frayed, static broadcast. A film felt, seen and heard through that interference.

EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA · COMPOSITING · AI GENERATION

EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA · COMPOSITING · AI GENERATION

WATCH THE FILM

POINT OF DEPARTURE

POINT OF DEPARTURE

POINT OF DEPARTURE

a hybrid approach
to the moving image

The creative power that AI generation offers comes at a price, with the old concerns of finance and logistics melding into questions of artistic honor and authentic voice.

The creative power that AI generation offers comes at a price, with the old concerns of finance and logistics melding into questions of artistic honor and authentic voice.

Boiling Fur: Combray emerges from a working method that treats the moving image as something to be excavated rather than simply recorded. The film draws from AI-generated imagery, organically filmed footage, and archival material — layering these sources through a compositing process that refuses to let any single reality dominate the frame.


The question the work asks is not one of production, it is one of perception. What does the image remember that the eye has forgotten? What persists in the space between a broadcast and the room it enters?

Boiling Fur: Combray emerges from a working method that treats the moving image as something to be excavated rather than simply recorded. The film draws from AI-generated imagery, organically filmed footage, and archival material — layering these sources through a compositing process that refuses to let any single reality dominate the frame.


The question the work asks is not one of production, it is one of perception. What does the image remember that the eye has forgotten? What persists in the space between a broadcast and the room it enters?

THE CENTRAL DEVICE

THE CENTRAL DEVICE

THE CENTRAL DEVICE

the television
as structure

Period CRT televisions appear throughout Boiling Fur as frames-within-frames

with each screen carrying its own content, its own era, its own emotional
frequency. The effect is less montage than simultaneity: the sense that multiple broadcasts are always happening at once, that memory and media are indistinguishable.


This structure draws on Proust's In Search of Lost Time, specifically the Combray section, where involuntary memory collapses time, leaving phantasmic relics of the past floating like motes in the rays of perception. The television set, here, is the Proustian mechanism updated for the broadcast generation.

Period CRT televisions appear throughout Boiling Fur as frames-within-frames with each screen carrying its own content, its own era, its own emotional frequency. The effect is less montage than simultaneity: the sense that multiple broadcasts are always happening at once, that memory and media are indistinguishable.

This structure draws on Proust's In Search of Lost Time, specifically the Combray section, where involuntary memory collapses time, leaving phantasmic relics of the past floating like motes in the rays of perception. The television set, here, is the Proustian mechanism updated for the broadcast generation.

Period CRT televisions appear throughout Boiling Fur as frames-within-frames with each screen carrying its own content, its own era, its own emotional frequency. The effect is less montage than simultaneity: the sense that multiple broadcasts are always happening at once, that memory and media are indistinguishable.

This structure draws on Proust's In Search of Lost Time, specifically the Combray section, where involuntary memory collapses time, leaving phantasmic relics of the past floating like motes in the rays of perception. The television set, here, is the Proustian mechanism updated for the broadcast generation.

THE TELEVISION TABLEAU — A LIVING ARCHIVE, A BROADCAST GRAVEYARD

THE TELEVISION TABLEAU — A LIVING ARCHIVE, A BROADCAST GRAVEYARD

THE EDITORIAL LOGIC

THE EDITORIAL LOGIC

THE EDITORIAL LOGIC

compositing
as method

Where the film does its most intensive work is in the superimposition images. Faces bleed through flags. Figures dissolve into one another. Archival footage surfaces through contemporary imagery like something remembered imprecisely.

This is not a technical effect applied after the fact. The compositing is the editorial logic of the film. Decisions about what to layer, at what opacity, with what color relationships, drive meaning the same way that cutting drives meaning in conventional editing.

For a small-budget production, this approach is genuinely liberating: the material cost of adding another layer to a composite is essentially zero. The creative cost — the judgment required to make layers mean something together — is everything.

TELEVISION MONTAGE — SUPERIMPOSITION LAYER IN MOTION

AI GENERATION

AI GENERATION

AI GENERATION

what generation
makes possible

Sentimentality and grotesquerie occupy the same frame throughout Boiling Fur, each painting a more vibrant version of the other.

Sentimentality and grotesquerie occupy the same frame throughout Boiling Fur, each painting a more vibrant version of the other.

Sentimentality and grotesquerie occupy the same frame throughout Boiling Fur, each painting a more vibrant version of the other.

Generated imagery arrives already dreamed. Environments, figures, and creatures emerge from the model pre-aged, pre-lit, occupying an uncanny middle distance between the photographic and the imagined. The work begins not with a blank canvas but with something that already carries a mood, re-framing the task from interrogation to invention.


The Boiling Fur sheep was not designed so much as discovered — generated, then placed into domestic settings where its wrongness could do its work. Sentimentality and grotesquerie occupy the same frame throughout, each painting a more vibrant version of the other

WHAT THIS OPENS UP

WHAT THIS OPENS UP

WHAT THIS OPENS UP

freedom at
small scale

The limit was never really the budget. It was always the gap between what could be imagined and what could be made visible. That gap has narrowed not because the tools are smarter, but because the image-making process now runs closer to the way memory actually works: associative, layered, non-linear, unwilling to stay in one time.

Peter Grant is a moving image artist, illustrator and Art Director whose practice spans five decades of collage methodology. Working with generative imagery and archival sound, he constructs motionscapes that locate the present inside the past. His work explores the dissolving boundary between memory and image-making through hybrid processes that treat the lived archive as raw material.

Peter Grant is a moving image artist, illustrator and Art Director whose practice spans five decades of collage methodology. Working with generative imagery and archival sound, he constructs motionscapes that locate the present inside the past. His work explores the dissolving boundary between memory and image-making through hybrid processes that treat the lived archive as raw material.

Peter Grant is a moving image artist, illustrator and Art Director whose practice spans five decades of collage methodology. Working with generative imagery and archival sound, he constructs motionscapes that locate the present inside the past. His work explores the dissolving boundary between memory and image-making through hybrid processes that treat the lived archive as raw material.

© Peter Grant 2026

Contact: petergrantdesign@gmail.com