Erarta Museum presents an exhibition by the photographer and designer Klaudio Mehmeti taking the viewer on a journey through the elements tamed by artificial intelligence
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Surreal landscapes co-created with AI image generators
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Cultural landmarks that must be not only preserved but recontextualised
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Photographs of the iconic monuments of the past transplanted from their original settings and enveloped by nature
In a time when technology rapidly shifts our ideas of the world, one struggles to imagine something that couldn’t exist. Poets often visualised imagination, and the inspiration that comes with it, as a ride on the back of Pegasus, the mythical flying horse, affording the opportunity to take off and change one’s perspective of the familiar landscape. The Pegasus harnessed by Klaudio Mehmeti gave the artist the power to instantly transport through space various great monuments of the past, simultaneously transforming them in a manner evoking the creative practice of Christo Javacheff who spent two decades draping the building of Reichstag in meters of silver fabric.
Seeing the Impossible, an exhibition staged through a collaboration with 365 ART Gallery, takes the viewer on a journey through the elements of water, earth, air, and fire tamed by artificial intelligence. In Klaudio Mehmeti’s fantasy worlds, iconic cultural landmarks are seamlessly enveloped by nature. A classical temple is seen floating in the clouds as if in an animated film, while Gothic cathedrals appear unscathed by fire, with blazing flames only accentuating their intricate sculptural decor. All these creations seem to build on the ingenious tradition of visionary architecture that used to provide an experimental creative vent to the architects of the past – with one reservation. Transferring their boldest architectural fantasises onto paper, engineers of yore documented their envisaged designs of cyclopean structures or recorded the daring ideas that were simply impossible to execute in their times. By its very nature, visionary architecture involves projects that one day, as time passes and technology evolves, might as well become feasible, thus anticipating the future. Mehmeti’s imagined architecture, by contrast, deals with already existing sights that must be preserved and ‘reinvented’ in the context of melting glaciers, nuclear disasters or even worse scenarios. These, too, are projects in their own right, but let us hope that they stay in the imaginary realm of the impossible.
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