E8 in the first two installments of the series PostHum Condition. In Children Playing (2023), and Tammuz (2024), he deployed generative AI as an avatar, an alien agent introduced into the creative process to add an eerie layer of estrangement. By allowing the avatar to interfere with his own drawings, watercolors, and video footage, Platnic addressed concerns and anxieties visà-vis the techno-cultural race towards artificial intelligence. In these works, Platnic proceeds to develop a highly idiosyncratic visual language. He returns to painting as a potent medium of communication, which he invokes through iconic painters such as Bosch and Picasso. Tammuz (figure 5) is a stop-motion UHD video that draws on Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Hermit Saints (c. 1493) as a primary stated reference. As in Platnic’s earlier videos, the production begins with overpainting a performer’s face and body to emulate Saint Jerome from the central panel of The Hermit Saints. Platnic also created a painted tree and a separately painted background, which were then subjected to a generative process using a customized early open-source version of Stable Diffusion, isolated from the internet and thus from further external learning. The video was composed frame by frame from generated images based on Platnic’s original drawings, paintings, and video footage of the performer, guided by his programming and open-ended prompts. The process involved selection and recombination of AI-generated images, allowing Platnic to direct the generative process while maintaining a degree of random flow. Figure 2. Michel Platnic, After “Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud”, 2013. Three Videos, Full HD each.
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