I am delighted to share that Garden of Alicinations has received the Best Micro-Short Film award at the Action/Fantasy/Sci-Fi/Thriller Festival in Los Angeles.
Although the film is just over a minute long, it grew out of a research journey that has accompanied me for many years. Long before working with artificial intelligence, Alice had already become a central figure in my artistic practice, appearing in books, illustrations, objects, and visual experiments.
When I began making films with AI, I realized I could finally bring into motion worlds that had previously existed only as still images. Garden of Alicinations emerged from the meeting of two lifelong passions: Alice, as imagined by John Tenniel and Gertrude Thomson, and Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights.
Rather than adapting Lewis Carroll's story, I imagined Bosch's garden as Alice's unconscious, a place where dreams and metamorphoses unfold according to their own logic.
Ironically, the greatest challenge was not creating images, but removing them. Using Photoshop and AI, I spent days digitally emptying Bosch's painting, removing hundreds of figures to make room for Alice to experience her own journey through that extraordinary landscape.
The film features an original soundtrack by Paulo Beto, whose music brings rhythm, atmosphere, and depth to this dreamlike world.
Watching the audience respond with so many different interpretations was one of the most rewarding parts of the experience. I have always hoped to create works that remain open to the viewer's imagination.
I am deeply grateful to the festival for this award, to everyone who watched the film, and to all those who continue to follow my work. And perhaps the greatest discovery this film gave me was realizing that Alice's garden has also been quietly blooming within us.
Alice and the Seven Keys
Bosch also appears in Alice: 150th Anniversary Edition (Lewis Carroll. Translated by Maria Luiza X. de A. Borges. Collages by Adriana Peliano based on John Tenniel's original illustrations. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2015). In this edition, Tenniel's Victorian illustrations are reimagined through collages that incorporate references to the history of art, including Hieronymus Bosch.
In the image titled Alice Puzzle, Alice's body no longer obeys conventional anatomy, transforming into a composition of paradoxes. Multiple heads, extra arms, impossible objects, dice, chess pieces, and Penrose triangles coexist within a single figure, as though Alice's identity were constantly being reconstructed. The collage brings Carroll's nonsense into conversation with Bosch's world of hybrid bodies and improbable combinations.
Bosch also reappears in the Caterpillar scene. Rather than simply illustrating Alice's conversation about identity, the collage transforms the Caterpillar into a distinctly Boschian creature. It assumes a hybrid body, somewhere between human, insect, and machine, surrounded by fantastical architectural forms inspired by The Garden of Earthly Delights. Alice stands before the figure as if witnessing a metamorphosis in progress, reinforcing one of Carroll's central themes: identity as something fluid, unstable, and constantly changing.
In Lewis Carroll na Era Vitoriana: Outras Histórias de Alice (Lewis Carroll in the Victorian Era: Other Alice Stories), written by Katia Canton and illustrated by Adriana Peliano (DCL, 2010), Bosch is not used simply as an artistic reference, but as a world into which Alice can enter. Throughout the book, characters such as the Caterpillar, Humpty Dumpty, and the White Rabbit are reimagined within scenes inspired by The Garden of Earthly Delights, blending Carroll's nonsense with Bosch's dreamlike creatures, hybrid beings, and fantastical landscapes.
Rather than illustrating Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the book places Alice in dialogue with the history of art, treating Bosch as a visual language of metamorphosis and imagination. In retrospect, this approach anticipates Garden of Alicinations, where Bosch's garden becomes the dreamlike landscape of Alice's unconscious.
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