Boris Eldagsen
ABOUT
I was in conversation with the Berlin painter Wolfgang Petrick about art and AI during the last two years before his death. I was struck by how naturally, at over eighty, he integrated AI into his work as a tool for developing ideas and visual drafts. We also discovered a great deal of common ground in our artistic influences and recurring themes. My twenty-part series of AI-generated videos, PETRICK’S PURGATORY, is my personal homage to Wolfgang Petrick. In PETRICK’S PURGATORY, Boris Eldagsen enters Wolfgang Petrick’s pictorial universe as an accomplice. Across twenty brief chapters, the film unfolds like a fever dream, moving through a world of beasts, nurses, cyborgs, infants, wolves, apes, carnivorous plants, fire, and flood. The painter himself flickers through this unstable cosmos. Around him, his own visual world refuses to behave: bodies mutate, animals become both companions and threats, and humanity and nature bare their teeth. Care and violence, comedy and apocalypse, tenderness and grotesque excess all inhabit the same pictorial space. Between jungle and city, theatre stage and purgatory, there is no clear divide.
SELECTED FRAMES — 8 OF 8
PROCESS
I photographed painting of Wolfgang Petrick. As he was mainly painting portrait formats, I changed them to landscape with AI, often combining 2 original paintings. I used a photo portrait of him as an additional references. In the edit, I added additional sounds from freesound.org. I edited with Premiere Pro.
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