ROMANTISIZER
2024
Visual Artist Susanne Gabler (Germany)
Painter, AI-Artist Carsten Bund (Los Angeles)
2024 is the 250th birthday of Caspar David Friedrich. To mark the occasion, we have collaboratively developed the ROMANTISIZER.
For the first time, LA-based artist Carsten Bund and German visual artist Susanne Gabler are collaborating in this new form.
Carsten Bund is a painter and programmer. His AI work is continued here in this new shared project.
Gabler works in situ and reacts to situations in terms of content. She often uses aesthetics to depict the dramas of the world. The often ecological themes of her works always emphasise the social and thus socio-political issues that are actually being highlighted.
Caspar David Friedrich brought us classic romantic painting. It was taken up by Walt Disney and an endless number of designers. The artists of this art epoch declared nature to be a temple, spirituality, refuge, solace and the only true orientation. The Romantics warned us of the desecration of the world and of our loss of this connection with it.
Today we are more romanticised than ever. Because the romanticised look back at nature, which we have irretrievably lost, unleashes in us a growing longing for intact nature.
We are continuing CDF's work. To do this, we have neither intact nature nor an irrepressible belief in God, miracles or ourselves as the greatest creature on earth at our disposal. We use his aesthetics, synthesizing methods and current images of our world.
The perception of the changed situation of our nature is symbolised in every picture by the educated viewer. The ambivalent scenes can depict beautiful sunsets as well as raging natural disasters. The audience reflects itself.
We enter into a multifaceted dialogue with the AI. In the first step, we fed the AI with our observations and created 1,000-fold scenarios of the world. We then used the AI to multiply this image material 100,000 times. The AI then helps us to filter out the romantic masterpieces from this large quantity that convey the desired moods. This generated image material is first incorporated into an Ai-memory, from which it is then reassembled using evolutionary methods. Finally, we let a computer paint the romantic picture and the viewer can watch this process.
The new realities do not change our romantic perception. We reproduce these by means of contemporary images with the ROMANTISIZER.
If it is not interrupted, it paints romantic works forever. It is thus the image or afterimage of evolution, which is never finished.
March, 28th 2024 | LA | Text by Carsten Bund, Susanne Gabler