TIPTOEING AROUND THE VOID

or: 42 Francis Bacons vs. 8 AIs

AI-generated video, AI-generated text, AI-generated sound, 05:00 min, 2026

In this 5-minute AI-generated video, Eldagsen stages a confrontation between the British painter Francis Bacon and AI. Bacon represents a radical proposition: that art is the consciousness of mortality made visible. Not narrative. Not decoration. Flesh realizing it will end. Bacon’s figures do not illustrate pain; they function as pressure systems. They vibrate with the knowledge of decay. The body in Bacon is already slipping – toward meat, toward silence, toward the scream that has no audience.

The AI, by contrast, produces the appearance of rupture without risk. It can distort a face, liquefy a body, simulate horror – but it can’t anticipate death. It has no stake in disappearance. Where Bacon painted as if every stroke were an encounter with annihilation, the machine operates without mortality, without fear, without skin in the game.

And yet – here lies the conceptual twist – everything in TIPTOEING AROUND THE VOID was co-produced with AI: script, images, animation, sound. The rant against the machine is written with the machine. The meditation on mortality is generated by a system that does not die. Forty-two Bacons confront eight AIs in a hall of mirrors where authorship dissolves into collaboration, and critique becomes complicity.

TIPTOEING AROUND THE VOID asks:

• What happens to art when mortality is removed from the equation?
• And what happens to the artist when even the scream is co-written by the machine?