Nacho Valenz - AI Artist | ContraWork by Nacho ValenzNacho Valenz
Channel, shape, finish.
THE GOOD STUFF
A corporation owns everyone's dreams. REM sells bootleg ones out of the lining of his coat, in a parking lot, in broad daylight, and nobody walking past even looks at him.
Every episode is one sale. You're the customer. The whole thing is shot through your glasses, so you never see your face, and neither does he.
The pilot has REM working outside a big-box store. You walk up, he clocks you immediately, and he starts running you through the latest shipment. Dreams, fresh in, one color at a time. Then you ask him for something stronger. He always has something stronger. He'll judge you for it, and he'll sell it to you anyway.
Where it goes next: same lot, same coat, a new customer every episode. That's the format, and the format is the joke. Whatever you came looking for, REM has a color for it and a speech to go with it.
"This is what you're looking for." He says it every time, and it's always true. The pilot cuts right there, with the iridescent one already sold and no idea what's inside it. A spicy dream, or one last dinner with your parents on a school night. You decide what counts as stronger.
The next episode opens that dream. And that's where the series starts showing its hand: every customer asks for one thing, but what they walk away with says a lot more about them than it does about REM. KITTY.
The bronze Cat at The Met (56.16.1, Ptolemaic Period, 332–30 BCE) is not a statue: it is a coffin for a cat mummy, a gift to the gods. KITTY builds the world around the object: the embalmer who made it, and the moment before the cat became sacred. It imagines that cat alive, in an embalmer's workshop, on a table shared with two more objects from the collection: a set of limestone canopic jars guarded by the four Sons of Horus (28.3.57a, b) and Duamutef, the jackal headed funerary figure (12.182.37a). Thirty nine seconds, four takes, graded like a 1940s three strip Technicolor print.
Everything was built inside FLORA. The Met's Open Access photographs became character sheets and a set plate with Nano Banana Pro; the base stills were composed from them and graded with Seedream 5 Pro as a strict LUT, so no object changed its hue. Every take was written by Claude Opus 5 running as a text node on the canvas and animated by Seedance 2.5 with native audio, one take at a time. The score is a small Ptolemaic ensemble generated with Suno; edit and museum labels in ffmpeg. The canvas was driven from Claude Code through FLORA's MCP, and every frame was approved by a human before a single credit was spent.
About the museum piece: Cat, Ptolemaic Period, 332–30 BCE. Bronze with lead, H. 27.4 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1956 (56.16.1), Gallery 134. A receptacle for a cat mummy, one of the luxurious offerings buried in temple precincts, especially those of the goddess Bastet. The gold ring in her pierced ear is now missing; the incised collar carries a medallion in the shape of a protective eye.
Original artworks at The Met (Open Access, Public Domain):
Cat, 56.16.1:
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/544118
(https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/544118)Canopic jar with jackal head, 28.3.57a, b:
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/559934
(https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/559934)Funerary Figure of Duamutef, 12.182.37a:
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/551149 Title: FOLLOWER OF
FOLLOWER OF wakes a painting nobody signed. "Christ's Descent into Hell" (The Met, 26.244) is by an anonymous follower of Hieronymus Bosch, sold as a Bosch in Prague in 1926 and still unattributed. I chose it because I love Bosch, and because a painting by a follower asks the question the whole panel is about: who follows whom.
For a hundred seconds the painting comes to life without ever leaving the surface of the paint. A lantern wakes it. Light breaks the gate of hell. Adam and Eve beg with empty hands, the saved climb the stairs, Saint Christopher slips away from the devil's army with the child on his shoulders, Judas will not let go of the bag, Sisyphus keeps climbing, and the ones who stay behind keep living by the giant head. The ending comes from the Met's own technical notes: the blue corner of the sky was painted over fire. The painter changed his mind.
Every shot starts from a crop of the Met's open access image: no new figures, no new colors, only what the painter left. Each crop was upscaled with Magnific Precision Upscaler, animated with Kling 3.0 Pro, with prompts refined by Claude Opus 5 inside FLORA. The narration is Gemini TTS, the score is ElevenLabs Music: a sixteenth century Franco-Flemish consort reimagined for a painting of hell. The whole pipeline ran from Claude Code on the desktop through FLORA's MCP: the agent built the graph, ran the models and kept the production ledger, and every creative decision stayed with me. Structure, shot list and sound design follow a kishotenketsu: the turn is not a fight, it is a painter changing his mind.
Christ's Descent into Hell, Follower of Hieronymus Bosch (Netherlandish, second quarter of the 16th century). Oil on two oak planks, 53.3 x 116.8 cm. The Met, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926 (26.244), on view in Gallery 613. A panoramic hell where Christ breaks the gate to free the just: Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, David and the patriarchs climb a ruined tower, Sisyphus heaves his stone up the rock on the right, and Judas is dragged back. Paint analysis shows the orange of the burning sky continuing under the blue in the upper left corner: more of the sky was originally on fire. Public Domain, Open Access.
Original artwork (The Met, Open Access): https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/435725 CCRROOAAKK!! Built from failed iterations.
Attempts that did not deliver. Transformations that broke, things the model added that blocked the natural flow, states that went nowhere. I trimmed them and joined them with other attempts to build this.
Seedance 2.5 in CapCut Video Studio, joined by hand so the discards run as one continuous piece. If you look closely, the seams are still there, but the trip holds.
Not an entry, just what the cutting room floor had to say. 🐸
My entry: https://on.contra.com/mqqFKB