Petr Chroustovský / HyperBosch: TheGarden Reanimated

This interview with artist and director Petr Chroustovský offers a deep insight into the background of his new audiovisual project, HyperBosch: The Garden Reanimated. In it, the author discusses his unique creative process, the blending of historical art with generative AI, and his motivations for reanimating Hieronymus Bosch's iconic masterpiece. You will also learn how he perceives the impact of new technologies on independent filmmaking and why he views their application as a natural next step in the evolution of cinematic language.

What originally drew you to experimental films and audiovisual projects?

Experimentation has been a natural part of my creative work from the very beginning. I started with painting and photography, and even then I was always looking for ways to do something new, differently, or in my own way within each technique – as, I suppose, every artist does. When I moved into film, I brought the same approach with me. I enjoyed trying new methods and techniques, such as time-lapse, which I also used in the film One-Year Garden (2014), and looking for ways to use the film medium itself to tell a story a little differently.

Whether I am working with painting, photography, traditional film, or generative AI, the medium and the technology are primarily tools that allow me to retell a story and give it my own visual form.

With generative AI, experimentation goes one step further for me – it is almost an

“experiment squared.” The ways of working with this medium are new and, in many respects, completely different from traditional filmmaking. I also like working with the uncanny valley effect – that particular sense of unease and alienness that AI-generated images can evoke. I do not always try to suppress these imperfections; on the contrary, I sometimes use them deliberately as part of the film language. This principle does not always work, and not every viewer will interpret it the way I intended. My films, however, are usually aimed more at curious viewers who are willing to accept a certain degree of ambiguity and find their own meanings in the images.

What does your creative process look like, from the initial idea to the finished work?

At the beginning, there must first of all be a reason – or a desire to realise something that has fascinated me in life but has remained only a desire – and a reason why the work should exist at all. There is a certain degree of engagement in that, as well as a desire to change the world. The Surrealists declared that they wanted to change the world; I want to change the way it is perceived. I need to have a central idea, something I want to communicate through film. With HyperBosch, for example, it was an attempt to translate into a contemporary audiovisual language the message that Hieronymus Bosch sought to convey through his painting. It is a certain moral position – an awareness that our behaviour has profound consequences. I try to squeeze every such theme and motivation completely dry in my films.

I therefore usually begin with a relatively simple idea and then develop it introspectively. I do not have a precisely written screenplay in advance or a clearly mapped-out path from beginning to end. During the creative process itself, new connections, images, or situations occur to me, gradually opening new “windows” into the story. Some of them expand the original idea, while others may lead me in a direction I did not anticipate at all at the beginning.

That is generally how my creative process works – it is a combination of a clear reason to say something and a relatively free, introspective path towards the result. In a certain sense, it could be called research. Atmosphere, visual style, and rhythm are of course important, but they come later. Music is traditionally one of the central elements in my work; for me, it represents reverie, interpretation, and inspiration. These are then the means through which I shape the core idea and the story. At the very beginning, however, there is always above all the desire and the reason to communicate something.

What is most important to you when creating a work – the story, the visuals, the atmosphere, or the emotion you want to evoke in the viewer?

These elements naturally influence one another, but what matters most to me is the idea and the reason why the work exists at all. I need to know what I want to communicate through the film. The story, visuals, atmosphere, music, and resulting emotion are then the means by which I carry that core idea to the viewer.

At the same time, I do not feel the need to explain everything literally to the audience. I find it much more interesting to create a space in which viewers can discover some of the meanings for themselves. What remains may be fascination, unease, beauty, disgust, humour, or a combination of several contradictory feelings. I like the moment when a film does not end with its final shot but somehow continues in the viewer’s mind.

In your opinion, how are new technologies changing the possibilities available to independent filmmakers and visual artists?

Very fundamentally. Today, technology enables an individual to realise things that until recently required a studio, a large crew, and a substantial budget. Generative AI has radically accelerated this process and relieved the creator of many directing and production-related tasks. By that I mean that a director is also a psychologist, an employer, and an organiser who has to keep a crew together socially in order to achieve a vision. Fortunately, that kind of schizophrenia disappears with these tools, provided the person using them is capable enough. Simply put, it is about independence and creative freedom, unburdened by social pressures. In addition, resources that traditional production used to require – extras, sets, and the costly operation of studios – can be used elsewhere, which I believe can also be socially beneficial.

That does not mean that creation automatically becomes easier. You still need an idea, aesthetic judgement, dramaturgy, the ability to make choices, and above all an understanding of why you are creating something. Technology, however, dramatically lowers production barriers. For independent creators, I believe this is extraordinarily important. Suddenly, worlds can be created that would otherwise have remained only in the author’s imagination.

What specifically drew you to the work of Hieronymus Bosch and led you to transform The Garden of Earthly Delights into an experimental film?

Bosch has been part of my visual world since childhood. When I began painting and became interested in the old masters, he affected me in a completely different way from most other artists. His work contains brutality, humour, absurdity, corporeality, moral precision, extraordinary imagination, timelessness, and a rawness that has endured for centuries.

The Garden of Earthly Delights also feels almost like a comic book. It contains an enormous number of small stories, characters, and situations. As your eyes move across it, you are, in a sense, already editing your own film – shaped by your own experience.

When technologies appeared that were capable of convincingly setting these fragments in motion, I realised I could do something that would have been practically impossible for an individual artist only a few years earlier: enter Bosch’s world and allow it to exist in time. To update it into cinematic form and make it accessible to an ordinary viewer for whom the old masters may otherwise feel very distant.

How did you transform individual details from Bosch’s painting into moving film scenes? Was there any particular detail or moment that was especially difficult?

I worked with individual fragments of the painting almost as if they were film shots. They had to be digitally cleaned, sometimes reconstructed or extended, and then I had to find a way to set them in motion without allowing them to lose Bosch’s visual identity completely.

A major challenge was posed by scenes containing nudity, violence, bodily deformities, and grotesque motifs. These are essential parts of Bosch’s work, but contemporary generative systems are particularly sensitive to this kind of content.

The second challenge was deciding when the AI had simply made a mistake and when it had instead created something interesting. I deliberately left some artefacts in the film. They create a peculiar sense of unease – the viewer feels that something in the image is not quite right. And I believe this uncanny effect belongs to HyperBosch.

Your work combines historical art with generative AI. Where do you see the boundary between Bosch’s original work and your own artistic interpretation?

I consider that boundary very important. Bosch created the original world, its characters, symbolism, and fundamental visual narrative. I am not trying to appropriate his authorship.

My own authorship begins when I decide where the camera will look, which gesture will become an action and which detail will acquire significance, how long the viewer will see it, how it will move, what will follow it, and what relationship will emerge between image, music, and sound. Fortunately, I have studied this painting for years, so I allow myself to say that I understand the hidden meanings and the background of its symbolism – the eternal struggle between good and evil and the underlying moral message, which will probably never cease to be relevant to our society.

I therefore do not see HyperBosch as a replacement for Bosch’s painting. It is a dialogue with it. The original exists outside my film, and my film is one contemporary way of rereading this centuries-old work through cinematic language – a way of bringing its message back to life, a message that I believe our confused era needs.

What kind of experience or feeling would you like the viewer to take away from the film?

I would like viewers to feel that, for several minutes, they have genuinely stepped inside Bosch’s painting – into an absurd reality that nevertheless has deeply embedded moral foundations.

The film begins relatively gently, almost meditatively, with God creating the world, but gradually that world changes, grows denser, and descends into chaos. The music follows the same trajectory. Beauty gradually turns into something unsettling and eventually monstrous and destructive.

If, when the film ends, the viewer feels both fascination and a certain degree of unease, then I think the film has fulfilled its purpose.

You have said that Bosch has been part of your life since childhood. How has your perception of his work changed over the years?

As a child, I was primarily drawn to his imagination. I was fascinated by the monsters, strange creatures, grotesque situations, the abundance of incredible details, and the way ordinary objects were combined into surreal forms and mutations. I would also note here that a certain kind of visual creativity produced by AI can look remarkably similar when we give it enough freedom.

As I grew older, I became much more aware of what lies beneath those images. In my view, Bosch is not merely a fantastic painter of bizarre worlds. He is also an extraordinarily precise observer of human behaviour. His themes – desire, pride, lust, violence, excess, fear, and human stupidity – have not disappeared. They have simply changed form and become globalised.

That is precisely why his work may seem even more relevant to me today than when I first discovered it. In his paintings, we can read themes that resonate very strongly with the present – the decline of values and humanity, violence, migration, social chaos, and the loss of moral boundaries. I do not think Bosch’s work is bizarre merely for its own sake. There is a warning in it, and an appeal to humanity to reflect on our actions and on the values we want to preserve as a society.

To a certain extent, I therefore also see HyperBosch as an update of this work for the present day. Film is now one of the primary media through which we receive stories and images of the world. My aim was not to improve or replace Bosch’s work, but to translate part of its message into a contemporary audiovisual language and allow today’s viewer to enter his world in a different way. A painting several centuries old can therefore speak to the present again through film – even though the questions it asks us remain, in many respects, exactly the same.

Your work explores science fiction, cyberpunk, transhumanism, and new technologies. What attracts you most to these subjects?

In my view, science fiction is no longer as far removed from reality as it once was. To some extent, we are already beginning to live it. A number of visions and predictions made by science-fiction authors that seemed fantastical only a few decades ago are, in one form or another, becoming reality. Artificial intelligence is probably the most visible example. That is one reason these themes feel exceptionally relevant to me today.

I am not trying to make explicitly activist art or to predict the future. I am more interested in finding new ideas in a world that may be only a few years ahead of us and thinking about where current technological development might lead. At the same time, I try to approach these themes with humour as well. Not everything has to be dystopian or a piece of serious philosophical speculation. Recently, for example, I created the sci-fi comedy Gust – Taste Channel, in which humour is one of the main ways I work with the idea of the future. The film is thematically quite close to Black Mirror, but unlike that serious series, it treats those ideas with strong exaggeration and humour.

Cyberpunk, artificial intelligence, and transhumanism are probably the closest to me. All of these themes somehow touch on the question of what technology will do to human beings – how it might change, influence, or improve us. Personally, I am most interested in that last possibility. We do not have to view technological development solely as a threat. It can also move us forward.

Perhaps one day we will no longer speak only of Homo sapiens, but of a kind of Homo digitalis. This is not my own idea – philosophy and futurology have long explored the possibility of a further stage in human evolution in which technology and artificial intelligence become a natural part of us, as does, for example, our creative group Homo Digitalis_3.2.1. What such a transformation would mean for our bodies, consciousness, identity, and ultimately for what we consider to be human is an immensely fascinating subject for me. That is why I return to it repeatedly in my work.

Do you think AI will remain primarily a tool for artists in the future, or could it gradually influence the very way we think about art?

Things are rarely as definitive as they first appear, and such transformations may take centuries. I think both will happen. Today, we often talk about AI as a tool because we compare it to a camera, a paintbrush, an editing suite, or software. I think that comparison is valid, but only partially.

Every major technology eventually changes aesthetics and the way we think. Photography changed painting. Film changed our perception of time and storytelling. Digital technologies changed the image. The internet changed the way information is created, distributed, and consumed.

I think AI will do something similar. It will not only change the way images and films are produced. Gradually, it will also change our expectations of originality, authorship, reality, and perhaps the very definition of the creative process.

That is precisely why I find the current period so interesting. The new language has not yet stabilised, and we can watch it emerge almost in real time.

What would you like to explore or create through your work in the coming years?

Working with generative AI itself is no longer as great a technological challenge for me today as it was only a few years ago. The tools are improving extremely quickly, and the entire process is becoming simpler, faster, and more efficient. In my view, that shifts the focus back towards what matters most – having a good idea, writing a good screenplay, and knowing what you actually want to communicate to the viewer.

However, this movement of generative technologies towards technical perfection also has another side. In a certain sense, the medium is becoming less surprising and less inspirational, and it is moving towards a kind of uniformity of reality, which may ultimately work to its detriment.

I also enjoy moving between genres and do not want to lock myself into a single specific style. I have several projects in development that I would like to complete in the coming years. One of them is the fairy tale Bubola and the Space Journey, which I would like to bring to its final form. At the same time, I am continuing my music project Secrets of Kandahar, where music naturally connects with my audiovisual work under the banner of d3arts.cz – my studio.

My goal is, of course, to continue establishing my films on the international film market and festival circuit, which has been going well so far. Alongside my own work, I also try to support and present other contemporary AI-based creation. For example, I am involved with Playlist IFF, which focuses on films made using generative tools and is based in Hradec Králové.

Most of my projects are created independently, so their scale and pace naturally also depend on funding opportunities. If someone is interested in my work and would like to help me complete projects such as Bubola and the Space Journey, Secrets of Kandahar, or other films currently in development, they can support my work through Patreon. Every new member gives me more room to devote myself to these projects and move them forward – and I have to admit there are not very many people there yet.

The film project HyperBosch: The Garden Reanimated has been selected for the 2026 Los Angeles Lift-Off Film Festival, where audiences can find it in the Trendsetter Shorts section. The festival will take place online from August 3 to 23, 2026. Tickets are already on sale, and the entire festival program—including HyperBosch—can be viewed from the comfort of your own home.