You Can Get the Tree Out of Me but You Can’t Get Me Out of the Forest

NEVERENDING STORIES by Boris Eldagsen is a collection of 13 AI-generated videos based on images that the artist generated in weeks of experiments. They were then animated, extended and cut into a loop in a video program. Eldagsen also generated the music as his own version of Doom Jazz. 

NEVERENDING STORIES feels like you’ve wandered into a Hammer horror film on the brink of total existential collapse. The visuals pulse between memory and nightmare — absurd spaces and strange figures that come and go like half-forgotten thoughts. It’s as if Tarkovsky’s STALKER got hijacked by Camus. Like a Sisyphean Cycle of coming back to the same place but never quite arriving, the loop stands in for both an escape and a trap.

From the first flickering image, you’re thrust into a disorienting space that feels more like a mental landscape than a physical one. The human form is present but always distant, always dissolving—like a memory that never fully belonged to you. Scenes jump and flicker, almost like the film itself is being erased as it’s playing. Eldagsen isn’t interested in comforting the viewer. The visuals pulse with a rhythmic unease, blurring the line between reality and a half-remembered nightmare. It’s as if you’re trapped in the liminal space between waking and sleeping, where everything feels both familiar and terrifyingly unfamiliar.

Beckett would have loved these videos. It’s existentialism with a gothic twist, touching on the absurdity of trying to connect with or searching for something. Whatever is searched for — it’s always slipping away. NEVERENDING STORIES doesn't just ask what it means to belong; it makes you question whether you were ever truly there to begin with.

"NEVERENDING STORIES were created as an impulse for an inner journey. As a viewer, ask yourself what memories, emotions, and thoughts are triggered and why. As a child of the 1970s, I grew up with black and white television and was fascinated by Boris Karloff, once because I had been given the same rare name, and also because I was fascinated by the 1930s horror films with him and Bela Lugosi. As a teenager, it was Kafka, later Camus' SISYPHUS, and Peter Greenaway that impressed me. I studied philosophy and art because I believed that both provided an answer to the big questions of life. Instead, I could only ask them better. Today my approach is psychological; I am interested in the unconscious mechanisms of the human mind." 

– Boris Eldagsen