Lost In Iteration I: The Dream That Dreams
Video installation 4K UHD, film, 4:26, table, chairs
2025
Text E. Gronenborn, animation: Runway, Kling
A woman – perhaps many – experiences a feverish hallucination. Faces multiply, blur, dissolve. Bodies fold in on themselves, trapped in the logic of a machine that misremembers forms. A man speaks – not in a commanding tone, but questioningly: What lies behind my prompt?
Lost in Iteration is a poetic nightmare of generative AI. It is based on the disturbances and distortions that arose in the interactive process with the machine. The deformations and perversions provide a deep insight into a collective consciousness trapped in the onion layers of AI.
The female figure(s) is both muse and self-aware fragment. She imagines, dissolves, is reimagined. Her body becomes a canvas for unintended creations, her voice breaks and echoes through layers of half-forgotten memories.
Who dreams these images? Whose longing do they reflect? And where is the origin, if each iteration forgets the previous one?
The last line sounds like a surrender: ‘I want to stay.’
This work asks whether, in a world shaped by generative systems, we can still recognise the origin of our fantasies, the authorship, the imagination or the creative intention – or whether art becomes an echo of unknown collective sources. Perhaps we do not dream the images of tomorrow – perhaps they dream us.
About Esther Gronenborn
After a successful international film career (alaska.de, Ich werde nicht schweigen, Das weiße Schweigen), Esther Gronenborn has expanded her work in recent years to include visual arts and media art. Using photography, digital collage and AI-generated video installations, she explores the boundaries between reality and imagination, memory and transformation. My visual works integrate cinematic language – such as time manipulation, symbolic overlays and narrative tension – into digital media and image synthesis.
Leave a Reply