Concept
I wanted to see what would happen if you fed the same short, blurred prompt to a neural network. The basis of this work is a found stock photo of a person sitting on a chair. Over 60 iterations of the «Add anything» prompt, the neural network progressively adds new elements to the original image. With each step, the person in the photograph becomes increasingly distorted, accumulating new details until they completely disappear beneath a layer of digital hallucinations and a clutter of objects.
References
The foundation for my reflections both during and after achieving the final result was Günther Anders' text, «The Antiquity of Man.» I found points of convergence between his work and mine, for example:
We can no longer say that technology is among other things in our historical situation. Instead, we must say: «technology» has become the world in which history unfolds, or, in other words, technology has become the subject of history with which we now merely «coexist.»
I also found myself aligned with the ideas of Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard, the video work of Esther Gronenberg, and others.
Process
Using the AI service Magnific, I utilized Nano Banana 2 with the same prompt. I then sequenced all the frames in post-production. I took the music from a HSE sound design student (raremotherfucker — emulation #6), slightly modifying it: I copied the track to extend it, as the original was shorter than my video.
Video
