This piece emerged as a conversation with myself about authorship, censorship and inspiration - an alchemical process designed to illuminate the darker corners of artistic drive.
Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, a mystical classic that has fascinated me longer than memory serves, speaks to the duality, perversion and ultimate transcendence of the dimensions we inhabit. In 2020, as AI erupted into popular culture, it presented new questions about copyright, authorship, hermetic intention and artistic integrity - though none of these questions were necessarily answered.
The experiment was methodical: separating the infamous triptych into 152 separate squares and printing them out. The squares were placed in a pile on a table, and I worked through the whole deck, writing a 40-word poem or prompt about each scene in an instinctive manner - intuiting words that reflected the image's content through the prism of today's society.
This text was then fed to an AI video generator, using both the prompt and the square as equal starting points. The machine took each image and phrase, exploring them down to their tendrils, revealing much about culture, programming, the soul and the nature of the beast.
Once this process was completed for all 152 discombobulated squares, they were fitted back together like a jigsaw, recreating the structure of the original painting in its intended triptych form.
The resulting 30-second video morphs from Bosch's masterpiece into a distorted, abhorrent version of itself, deconstructing and perverting as it goes along, creating an intra-dimensional feedback loop of art, thought and manifestation.
It doesn't look very nice though.