Artist Statement By Luciana Haill

‘Moving Mansions,’ Haill’s first generative AI video, is an act of aesthetic necessity. Responding to the pressures of the rental market, she initiated a forced 'Animated Decadent Withdrawal,' constructing a hyper-artificial refuge from Lidar scans and her own drawings. The film deliberately blurs the gothic mood of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher with the lonely, luxurious aesthetic of Des Esseintes's home in Joris-Karl Huysmans's Against Nature (1884). It is an enduring cultural response to precarity and emotion.

This hypnotic psychological fracturing is underscored by the ‘Canned Heat’ audio, made by "card shuffling" clips of unconnected memories sampled from her 7-inch vinyl collection. The overall mood of this haunting, hyper-artificial refuge is summarised by a lyric from a song written by John Lennon: “I was dreaming of the past. And my heart was beating fast. I began to lose control.”

Recently, Haill has expanded her practice into ironic video poems and AI-assisted music videos, combining her intricate hand drawings with text prompts and machine-generated imagery. These works conjure anachronistic encounters between poets, DJs, dandies, and artists—hyper-aesthetic and deliberately sterile visions that probe the psychological tension between nostalgia and artifice. Through this lens, Haill imagines how figures like Proust, Larkin, or Poe might use AI to manipulate art, memory, and language as a means of escape.