RAN SLAVIN

PARADISE NOW

Media: video, sound

Multi format: screens or projection. mobile. 1920 x 1080 pixels. Colour 25 FPS. Print editions. Paint on canvas.

Year: 2022-2024

Duration: Various

Languages: English

Paradise Now trailer / teaser:

 

PARADISE NOW is an encompassing title to a series of works that explore an intersection of generative adversarial networks (GANs) AI animation and text . Produced with AI processing, 3D software and post production effects as abstract animated ambient works as well as stills, Paradise Now touches on aesthetics of the sublime and beauty of a new nature.

Ignited by random coffee stains I collected on a plate under an espresso machine every morning , the coffee drops formed visuals of landscapes and dramatic eruptions on distant moons, suggestive odysseys and fictional heroic stories. I photographed and fed the data into an artificial intelligence GAN to be processed and expanded, with new visual data. I then added a figure to the works, a small holographic fictional nomad I named NoEveryOne – a portmanteau of ‘no-one’ and ‘everyone’; a protagonist, hero, avatar and axis of these subliminal ‘paradises’. NoEveryOne continues to contribute a human form and presence and be the only ‘constant’ in the ever changing morphing environment.

In the conceptual second phase of the work, only in commission, a freeze frame from Paradise Now is sent to Indian artists in Mumbai and New Delhi to be commissioned as a painting, oil-painted by hand on custom-sized canvases in the tradition of Bollywood cinema billboards. The cycle of translating different cultural nodes, the origin of coffee fluids synthesized by AI and 3D and redrawn in the opposite organic medium – oil paint via long-distance translation and collaboration results in an interesting conceptual cycle of digital, physical, cultural, multi national long distance collaboration.

Paradise Now/ Short term relationships:

At Suzanne Dellal Centre for Dance and Theatre Tel Aviv mapping :