Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ Becomes an Animated Computer Simulation

Medieval artist Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, a vision of paradise lost, is known for being a work of proto-surrealism that has inspired the work of many creative talents like Salvador Dali, William S. Burroughs, and Terry Gilliam. It’s a work that is also highly remixable, as Carla Gannis proved with her emoji-fied rework The Garden of Emoji Delights. Now the painting’s right panel—depicting a hallucinatory hell—undergoes a digital reconstruction as a 3D animation in Hell.exe.

Using the Unity game engine, filmmaker and visual artist Floris Kaayk transforms Bosch’s painting into a computer simulation. Unlike the painting, Kaayk’s simulated garden of hell is a monochromatic gray, featuring figures from crowd-sourced 3D scans.

Hell.exe was commissioned by Museum of the Image in Breda, Netherlands for the exhibition Nieuwe Lusten. Kaayk made the animation in collaboration with game developer Doortje Spanjerberg.

hell.exe from floriskaayk on Vimeo.

Click here to see more of Floris Kaayk’s work.

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