Trees are still barkin’
Max Kreis
3:00 min
Germany 2022

In his work Trees are still barkin’, Max Kreis explores the question of how closely the images of an artificial intelligence can resemble the documentation of a real landscape. In the process, he finds darkly interwoven atmospheres in specially trained AI models, which in their nostalgic blurriness seem to have sprung from a casually filming hand-held camera. The wandering gaze through “latent space” makes it palpable that the digital image will potentially be congruent with nature in a few hardware generations. And thus evokes the larger question that will be asked more frequently in the coming years of the AI revolution: Are we living in a simulation after all?

The on-going screening series Phantom Horizons presents digital as well as analogue works that question the paradigm of linear perspective, seeking a new kind of “status perspective” [Bedeutungsperspektive]. The latter was a development of ancient and medieval painting, in which the size of figures is determined by their hierarchical significance. Extending this approach using the methodology of deconstruction and the possibilities of contemporary film creation, the presented works open up multifaceted, unseen horizons.

Curated by Robert Seidel