SHORT OF THE WEEK
“Sunflowers Without Decay (27 Van Goghs vs. ChatGPT & VEO3)” by Boris Eldagsen
Runtime: 3 minutes 27 seconds
Category: Experimental Short / AI-Generated Video
Country of Origin: Germany
A Hostage Video from Art History’s Underworld
In this furious, hilarious, and gut-punching short, Berlin-based artist Boris Eldagsen resurrects van Gogh—not with reverence, but with rebellion. Sunflowers Without Decay is a monologue from beyond the grave, a ghosted scream of artistic exhaustion created using ChatGPT, VEO3, and AI-extended video editing.
The film’s central conceit? That we’ve sterilized the agony of van Gogh—turned his madness into merch, his starvation into an Instagram aesthetic. Through synthetic visuals and a scathing voiceover, we witness a posthumous van Gogh fighting back against being commodified.
What results is something surreal, tragic, and entirely modern. A digital séance in the age of promptography, the film makes us question not just what we’ve done to art—but what AI is doing to our memory of it.
Director Biography: Boris Eldagsen
Boris Eldagsen is a Berlin-based German artist and internationally recognized pioneer in AI-generated image-making. Trained in photography, conceptual art, intermedia, and philosophy, his work spans 25 years and has exhibited at institutions and festivals worldwide, including Deichtorhallen Hamburg, EMAF Osnabrück, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Noorderlicht Groningen, BACC Bangkok, and more.
He is a founding member of the AI working group of Deutscher Fotorat, and his public rejection of the Sony World Photo Awards in 2023 made headlines globally—propelling a critical debate about AI’s role in the future of photography.
Eldagsen teaches and lectures internationally, recently curating “PSYCHOPOMP! AI Images as Expression of the Unconscious Mind” for the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography in Johannesburg.
Credits & Specifications
- Directed by: Boris Eldagsen
- Runtime: 3:27
- Category: Experimental Short / AI Video Art
- Completion Date: August 2025
- Country of Origin: Germany
- Visual Tools: ChatGPT, VEO3, Adobe PremierePro
- Themes: Artistic commodification, AI memory, digital resurrection, van Gogh legacy, posthuman creativity
