Paradise Now
Paradise Now is an umbrella title for a body of work exploring the encounter between images generated from coffee, animation, and text created through artificial intelligence. The project is developed through a hybrid process combining generative adversarial networks (GANs), 3D software, and post-production techniques, evolving into abstract and atmospheric animation works alongside still images. Across these different media, Paradise Now explores the aesthetics of the sublime through technological translation – an attempt to imagine the emergence of a speculative, post-natural landscape, and the possibility of a divine presence appearing within a world created by machines.
The project began with an accidental everyday ritual: coffee stains collected on a plate beneath an espresso machine. Over time, the drops formed images resembling landscapes, volcanic eruptions, and distant planetary territories – images that evoked journeys, myths, and fictional heroic narratives. The stains were photographed and fed into a GAN system, where they were processed, expanded, and recombined into new visual information.
A recurring figure appears within these environments: a small holographic wanderer named Novery1 – a combination of no one and everyone. He functions simultaneously as protagonist, avatar, and witness, and serves as the only constant within constantly shifting worlds. The figure carries echoes of religious iconography – a saint, prophet, or messenger appearing within an expansive landscape – while existing equally as a science-fiction transmission: a holographic entity, avatar, or signal arriving from elsewhere.
This creates a tension between two forms of revelation: on one hand, religious revelation – the appearance of a figure within the world who points beyond it; and on the other, technological revelation – the appearance of information, a figure, or consciousness through a transmission system. Novery1 moves between these two states. He is neither quite human, angel, nor machine, but an image situated on the threshold between icon, avatar, and transmission.
The landscapes themselves function in a similar way. They are not simply imagined territories but almost landscapes of faith – places that seem to contain the promise of revelation. The halo, luminosity, symmetry, and impossible spatial dimensions recall the visual language of religious imagery, but pass through the mechanisms of simulation, algorithm, and science fiction. Instead of God appearing from the heavens, an entity emerges from a computational system; instead of a vision or miracle, an image is born from noise, data, and coffee stains.
In the second stage of the project, commissioned as a separate development, selected frames from Paradise Now are sent to artists in Mumbai and New Delhi, who reinterpret them as hand-painted oil paintings. The paintings are made on custom-sized canvases, drawing on the visual tradition of the large-scale Bollywood cinema billboards. In this way, the image’s original trajectory is reversed: from accidental organic matter, through artificial intelligence synthesis and digital abstraction, back into a physical, material medium requiring intensive handwork.
This cyclical translation – from liquid to algorithm, from algorithm to image, and from image to painting – carried out remotely, creates a loop between digital and material processes, between different cultures and geographies, and between different modes of making. The idea of the sacred also undergoes a transformation within this loop: the icon becomes an avatar, revelation becomes transmission, and the miracle becomes a computational process. Ultimately, Paradise Now operates as a distributed system of image-making, in which authorship, nature, faith, and imagination are continually displaced and reconstructed.
