E. Vuillard's Misia Natanson dans la Forêt

ALEXANDER HAHN

electronic media artist

ALEXANDER HAHN

electronic media artist

E. Vuillard's «Misia Natanson dans la forêt» re-imagined

WORK IN PROGRESS

Edouard Vuillard’s «Misia Natanson dans la forêt» re-imagined

Date: 2023/in progress

Dimension: variable

Technique: pigment ink on synthetic paper, video

Inspired by Édouard Vuillard’s *Misia Natanson dans la forêt* this cycle explores AI as a tool for re-entering historical images rather than generating new ones. Vuillard’s post-Nabis painting, with its dissolved contours and patterned foliage, is treated as a “latent” scene that could have been photographed or filmed but never was. By steering AI through this painterly thicket, I derive a black-and-white film in which Misia carefully treads along the brook, scored to gurgling sound, rustling leaves and crackling thud of footsteps. In this work, AI functions as a prosthesis of memory, extending a single painted moment into an elastic continuum of time, weather and sound, and opening the picture to lives it might have contained.