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THE NOTE THAT ERASES ITSELF
After Antonio Stradivari’s “Antonius” Violin (1711), from The Met’s Open Access archive.
In 2111, conservators discover that every performance has left microscopic traces in the wood—fingertips, pressure, breath, and the acoustic geometry of vanished rooms. They may preserve this silent archive forever, or play one final note that releases every memory while erasing it from the instrument.
The film moves slowly from the historical source to an imagined museum chamber. A conservator chooses the note. Memories detach from the violin as translucent fragments, drift into the dark, and dissolve while the sound grows in a restrained crescendo. Nothing is destroyed; something irreplaceable is spent.
Built and iterated on the FLORA canvas. The final 50-second motion and sound edit was completed as a local compositing pass after FLORA.
Original artwork: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/503008
A song kept forever is not a song.
And you what would you choose?
Set the memories free, knowing they would vanish forever…
or preserve them in silence?
The idea of every performance remaining in the wood is poetic and beautifully tied to the object itself. “Acoustic geometry of vanished musicians” is an incredible image.
That's a thoughtful process and work man! Great submission.
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What if this fragment is not simply what is left of an artwork — but a window into what was lost?
I chose Fragment with a Garden Scene, an early 17th-century Iranian textile from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, because I was drawn to the contrast between its physical fragility and the abundance of life it has preserved for more than four centuries. Although only a fragment survives, its musicians, flowers, plants, silk and metal-wrapped threads still hold the memory of an idealized garden.
That contrast became the starting point for What the Garden Remembers.
Using FLORA, I imagined the fragment moving through time. The project begins with the original artifact and expands its woven imagery into a speculative garden. As the world around it becomes increasingly fragile and architecture begins to decay, the textile survives. Its metallic threads gradually become roots, allowing the garden once represented on its surface to cross into the physical world.
Rather than attempting to reconstruct what originally existed beyond the fragment, I wanted to explore what cultural objects can carry forward when the worlds that created them change or disappear. The original textile remains visible throughout the process, becoming the anchor connecting past, present and future.
Empires disappear. Borders change. Buildings fall. The garden remembers.
Original artwork: Fragment with a Garden Scene
Attributed to Iran, early 17th century
Silk and metal-wrapped thread; lampas
The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Public Domain / Open Access
Original artwork link:
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/445260
The Impossible Prediction 🌌
For the Flora Museum Challenge, I reimagined the Met Museum’s Automaton Clock in the Form of Urania, Muse of Astronomy by Paullus Schiller (ca. 1620–30) as the center of a fictional scientific mystery.
The story begins in a 17th-century workshop, where Schiller is building Urania, a mechanical representation of the heavens. Once completed, the automaton comes alive: its gears turn, the celestial sphere rotates, and Urania moves as she tracks the heavens.
But something unexpected happens. One of the gears begins moving differently from the others. Schiller initially believes it is simply a mechanical flaw, but the unusual movement continues with strange precision.
The story then jumps forward 400 years. Modern researchers rediscover Urania and analyze the mysterious gear using contemporary astronomical data. What first appears to be an error turns out to correspond to a precise location in the night sky — something that could not have been known in Schiller’s time.
The researchers are left with an impossible question: How could a 17th-century machine contain an astronomical prediction about something discovered centuries later?
Using Flora, I developed this idea into a five-part visual narrative — The Creation, The Awakening, The Anomaly, 400 Years Later, and The Revelation — and turned it into a short cinematic demo.
The project explores how a real historical object can inspire an entirely new fictional world while preserving the character, craftsmanship, and astronomical identity of the original artifact.
Turning Urania into the center of a scientific mystery is such a strong narrative leap. The automaton clock already feels uncanny, and this concept pushes that quality beautifully.