Earthly delights digitized: re-imagining Bosch’s masterpiece in Madrid. From the article:

Painted between 1490 and 1510, The Garden of Earthly Delights continues to pack the same punch as it did centuries ago: it remains one of the most viewed works at the Prado Museum in Madrid, where it has been housed since 1939. The strong inspiration produced by these painted panels recently led a group of 15 contemporary artists to create new art based on the original painting, but using modern techniques such as sound art, video games and even artificial intelligence. The result of their reinterpretation is an exhibition curated by Colección SOLO and co-produced by the cultural center Matadero Madrid that will be open to the public at the latter space until February 2022. Most of the 18 works on display were made specifically for this exhibition where the Renaissance meets 21st-century interactive art.

Three giant LED screens measuring 4 x 7 meters each make up Speculum, an artwork by the Dutch collective SMACK whose members have come up with a digital, post-modern view of the original painting. Speculum creates a sensory overload with an updated version of the garden in pastel shades where some characters are being tormented with needles and psychoactive drugs while drones fly overhead and refugees on boats attempt to enter hell (only to find a wall barring the way there too). There are pets from TV shows, trees that produce wasteful plastic containers instead of fruit, and instead of God we see an effigy of physicist Isaac Newton….

“We realized there was a gap for artists who use technology to express themselves,” says Óscar Hormigos, director of Development for SOLO. “If it’s hard for any beginning artist to break through, it’s even more so for these kinds of artists.”….

But perhaps the most advanced demonstration of tech applied to art is the work by Mario Klingemann, who used AI techniques to turn The Garden of Earthly Delights into a work in constant flux: his algorithms change or repair various parts of the painting, changing its textures and making it more liquid or abstract. “Although it’s the artist who created the piece, it is the machine that’s doing art autonomously,” notes Hormigos.

h/t Renaissance Society of America