THE NEXT SECOND | 14 paintings. One fly. 500 years.

What if the old masters had used a camera instead of a brush? Fourteen paintings. One fly. Five hundred years. THE NEXT SECOND is a eight-minute AI-generated short film. Fourteen masterpieces — from Bosch to Magritte — are restaged as contemporary photographs and then given the one thing painting could never give them: the next second. A fly travels through all of them. She is not a decoration. For five hundred years painters hid a single fly somewhere in the picture — painted so well that people tried to brush it off the canvas. It was their way of saying: look how easily I can fool you. ABOUT Painting stops a second and holds it for centuries. Photography, when it finally arrived, turned out to know the same trick — only a thousand times faster. Susan Sontag called every photograph a memento mori; André Bazin said cinema alone embalms not the moment but its duration — “change mummified”. This film takes that literally: it gives fourteen frozen masterpieces the second that comes after. Its formal patron is Chris Marker’s La Jetée. The paintings are not in the film. They are in the Prado, the Rijksmuseum, the Musée d’Orsay, the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA — where they go on holding their one second, as they have for centuries. THE PAINTINGS BEHIND THE FILM — the originals hang here: Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (central panel) — Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Narcissus — Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, The Night Watch — Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Las Meninas — Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid Johannes Vermeer, Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window — Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden Edgar Degas, L’Étoile — Musée d’Orsay, Paris Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait — Musée d’Orsay, Paris Edvard Munch, The Scream — Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I — Neue Galerie, New York Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon — Museum of Modern Art, New York Grant Wood, American Gothic — Art Institute of Chicago Frida Kahlo, Me and My Parrots — private collection Edward Hopper, Nighthawks — Art Institute of Chicago René Magritte, The Son of Man — private collection Part of the series The Great Painters and the Lens of AI (2024) by Jacek Kadaj / neuro.photography — masterpieces of painting reimagined as contemporary photographs.