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What happens between two paintings?
For the FLORA Museum Challenge, I started with a series of paintings depicting Krishna from The Met’s Open Access collection.
Instead of treating each painting as an isolated artwork, I imagined them as frames from a much larger timeline.
Each original painting became an anchor — a preserved moment in the story.
Using FLORA, I explored what might happen before, during, and after those moments: bringing subtle movement to the characters, clothing, landscapes, water, architecture, and atmosphere while trying to preserve the visual language of the source material.
Then I stitched those moving paintings together into an event timeline, turning separate works created centuries ago into one continuous visual journey.
The most interesting part wasn't simply making the paintings move. It was imagining the time that exists between them.
https://app.flora.ai/view/js72bdbkzmhnjbmy5s83p0d1j18dx3tj
The paintings preserve the moments.
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/849528
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/849507
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/64890
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/37997
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/849518
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/849520
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/37886
This project explores the motion between them.
Created in FLORA using Open Access artworks from The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
#FLORAMuseum
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THE RISING
What if four paintings from different centuries could tell one story?
For the Flora Museum Challenge, I wove together Poussin's "Blind Orion," a stone Ganesha sculpture, Watteau's "Mezzetin," and Thomas Cole's "Titan's Goblet" into a single journey.
A blind hunter searches for the sun through trials of humility, listening, and endurance proving that seeing isn't always done with eyes.
Created using Flora AI Canvas with dozens of iterations on narrative structure, visual poetry, and Baroque cinematic language.
Met Archive References:
Nice !!
THE INSATIABLE DESIRE FOR DIVINE LOVE
A short film by Mont Carver
Original artwork:
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/360403
I spent hours moving through The Met’s Open Access collection before encountering Antonius Wierix II’s engraving The insatiable desire for divine love (Divini amoris intensio), created between 1570 and 1604. Among more than half a million works, this was the image that stopped me.
The engraving depicts a robed figure holding two hearts connected by fine lines to a crowned heart suspended above him. I was drawn to the way it gives longing a physical structure. It immediately connected with questions that already run through my work: queer love, faith, yearning and the unseen forces that bind people together.
The Insatiable Desire for Divine Love reimagines the engraving as a short magical realist film set in present-day Mexico City. A young Mexican woman prays before the image in her bedroom. The engraving awakens and becomes a prophecy. Later, she glimpses a luminous, long-haired figure. The apparition eventually returns in an ordinary human form as the girl living next door, whom she encounters on the rooftop while hanging laundry.
The divine revelation is not fulfilled through a distant celestial being, but through another young woman who has been living beside her all along. The film asks whether the love we address through prayer might already exist within the ordinary world, waiting to be recognized.
I developed the film through a branching process on the FLORA canvas rather than through a single generation. I began with visual research into Mexican domestic devotional spaces, bedrooms, neighborhoods, rooftops and clotheslines. From there, I developed the two characters and repeatedly refined their appearance, environments, visual continuity and relationship to the original artwork. I explored several interpretations of the apparition, rejecting images that felt overly polished or like generic digital fantasy in favor of something more intimate and slightly uncanny.
I also experimented with expanding and animating the original engraving while preserving its recognizable composition. Its engraved clouds begin to drift, the landscape responds to the wind, the hearts pulse and the delicate black lines tremble as though the antique image were awakening inside the paper. Across the film, those connecting lines are translated into the electrical wires and clotheslines of Mexico City. The pastoral landscape becomes a dense urban rooftop, while clouds reappear through white sheets moving in the wind.
The final visual language combines the tenderness of a magical-girl story with the texture of 35mm photography, domestic realism, devotional imagery and restrained analog dream effects. The dusty pink bedroom, faded turquoise textiles, warm daylight, black ink and pearlescent light were refined across connected iterations. Sound, music and an ornamental title sequence were developed as part of the same visual world.
The project also begins from the idea that some artworks have lives beyond museum walls. Devotional images can travel through reproductions, bedrooms and domestic altars, where they are framed, touched, prayed to and woven into everyday life. I wanted Wierix’s engraving to leave the digital archive and enter a young woman’s bedroom, not as a distant historical object, but as an intimate image she lives with and speaks to.
The film therefore traces a circular journey: from devotional print to museum collection, from the archive back into a home, and finally toward the museum again as a contemporary moving image. Rather than simply illustrating the original engraving, the work proposes a new afterlife for it, one in which sacred longing becomes domestic, Mexican and queer.
IG post: https://www.instagram.com/reels/Dc-6_KgRaEV/
Woww that's so cool, amazing job! 🙌
This is my 3rd and last submission, I have many Ideas so I combined them into one,
Inspired by:
1. Tip of a Pointer, Bayzantine 1080–1150 As cylindrical bullet seats
Link to Art: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/466296
2. Watch pobably swiss, ca. 1815-20 As key charm
Link to Art: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/193359
3. i- Terracotta plate, Greek, South Italian, Campanian, Teano, ca 330-300 BCE
Link to Art: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/248185
ii- Plate, ott and Brewer American, Retailer Bailey, Banks & Biddle American, ca 1884-90
Link to Art:
iii- Plate America, ca. 1800-20
Link to Art: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/5996
iv- Plate, Spanish, late 14th-early 15th century
Link to Art: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/468520
v- Plate, 1736-95
Link to Art: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/6448
As Ear Rings
What I built:
I made a video which shows the use of old Art as being used in modern daily life as different objects
Why I built:
I built this because I think the old Art can be used in modern day if we look it from new and different perspective, I wanted to give a different point of view to everyone for seeing the old Art differently
In short I used multiple old art works and I tried to show how they can be used in today's life
In all my three submission I focused on the Judging points specially, building the world around the art, and changing one thing about it, and making it feel realistic
Instagram Post Link:
https://www.instagram.com/p/Dc84QrYNYrE/
Twitter(X) Post Link:
https://x.com/AhmadSauleh/status/2096623920396796398?s=20
How did you came up with this idea, It is really nice for using the old Art as new things such as Ear rings, seats, keychain