The series, “PostHum Condition” 2020-2024, consists of seven parts of which “Children Playing” and “Tammuz” are the first two chapters. Mainly inspired by Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and various myths of the creation of the world, each section also includes other representations and references such as The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, the deserted landscapes of de Chirico and paintings by Picasso. All have in common: Man and his forms of representation, the theme of transformation, and the balance of power between nature and Man.
Platnic’s work “Children Playing” is a stop-motion video made of a sequence of hand-made drawings and photographs. It displays two children sitting and playing. In front of them, a sunflower blooms and disappears as the world around it shifts and changes, and behind them, a foreboding atmosphere that seems both familiar and uncanny. Platnic’s starting point was natural and familiar – photos of children, the sky, and a flower, and a composition based on Picasso’s known work “Claude et Paloma Drawing”(1954). It was when he added another layer of an AI-generated re-interpretation of the image fragments that the seemingly natural received an abnormal development, exploiting technology’s limitations. Platnic allowed the AI to distort and augment the images, allowing excessive repetitions, fragmentation, and malformations typical of its currently available level. By doing so, the video is, in fact, documenting a very short moment in time in which AI still cannot fool the unsuspecting viewer.
"Tammuz" is a stop-motion video made of a sequence of hand-made drawings and photographs. Tammuz, the Sumerian god of fertility and abundance embodies the power of nature renewed in spring. Tammuz dies every year as summer approaches when the grain is grounded. He then descends into Hell in the depths of the earth. It resurrects in the spring to give birth to a good harvest. Dante Alighieri in The Divine Comedy describes the almost instantaneous passage from one world to the other "Mars glows low at sunset, above the sea plain, such appeared to me - may I still see it! - a light on the sea coming so fast that its speed no flight equals”, “here is morning when there is evening” writes Dante to separate hell from purgatory. "You have your feet on the little sphere that forms the other side of the Giudecca". The passage between worlds, eras to the fertile land, renewal, the cycles of a fragile existence are the themes evoked in this video.
Tammuz
Garden Muse begins with photographs of a sitter. The photograph then serves as raw material to feed the LLM (Large Language Models, Artificial Intelligence) algorithm, utilizing different themes such as the purgatory characters described Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. After a composite photo is created from the various AI-generated images, a physical space is constructed and painted. Subsequently, the same sitter whose photo was provided sits physically inside the constructed space and is painted on. Finally, the set with the model is filmed. It is worth mentioning that to enhance the physicality of the process, the building part is performed live in front of the public as a live performance (LastFrontierNYC, Brooklyn, August 2023).