Anthomania
These are not flowers. These are not paintings. These are not photographs. Anthos is an illusion, a synthesis of man and machine, a dream given form in pixels and light. These floral compositions exist nowhere but within the infinite latent space of artificial intelligence—a realm of potentiality, of probabilities collapsing into images, of reality simulated but never truly lived. Inspired by the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age of still-life painting, yet born entirely of digital alchemy, Anthos is a reimagining of beauty: baroque in its excess, hyperreal in its detail, untethered from materiality. Every petal, every fragment of pollen, every curling leaf is a construct—impossibly precise, impossibly perfect, and yet hauntingly familiar. They exist, but they do not. They deceive, yet they reveal. "Everything you can imagine is real." — Pablo Picasso
How does AI know what a flower is? It has never seen one, never touched one, never watched one wilt in the evening light. AI does not experience the world. It is trained on vast datasets—millions of images, labeled and categorized, forming an intricate map of visual relationships. It does not "see" as we do; it calculates patterns, textures, and structures, reconstructing an idea of a flower based on statistical probability. When asked to generate an image, it does not retrieve a photograph or repaint an existing work—it invents something new, assembling elements from its training data into an image that has never existed before. The flowers in Anthos are born from this process, emerging from a latent space—a multidimensional field where all possible variations exist in an abstract, non-visual form until summoned into reality. AI does not understand a flower; it predicts one. And yet, in its hallucination, it creates something strikingly real—so real, it unsettles.
This is the new Baroque. Opulence without weight. Romance without decay. A 21st-century continuation of Jan van Huysum and Rachel Ruysch, where petals remain forever unfading, compositions never wilt, and time is held still in luminous clarity. Here, Art and Artificial Intelligence converge at the frontier of aesthetics. David Hockney says that artists do not have to create in the way they have before. He embraces digital tools, using the iPad as naturally as a paintbrush, challenging purists who see technology as separate from art. Anthos follows this trajectory—an art form born not from pigments and oil, but from data and light. What does it mean to create when the act of creation is shared with an algorithm? What does it mean for an image to be real? Anthos is a meditation on these questions, a digital florilegium for an era where the boundaries between the organic and the synthetic, the historical and the futuristic, the painterly and the computational, are no longer clear.