"Vanitas/Residue" is an audiovisual work created by the artist collective Vertigo and the award-winning composer Bára Gísladóttir. The piece was originally made for the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen (SMK) and exhibited in the fall of 2023. It was included as a contemporary work in the major exhibition on Baroque visual art but has been developed to be exhibited as a standalone work.

"Vanitas/Residue" consists of a video projection originally shown on a 8-meter-high semi-transparent canvas. The audio component is a newly composed piece for double bass by Bára Gísladóttir.

The work is based on the popular Vanitas motifs of the Baroque era. Vanitas paintings are typically still lifes showing, for example, skulls, soap bubbles, clocks, and wilted flowers. All these motifs are symbols of the transience of life, the emptiness of pleasure, and, not least, death.

With the use of AI, we have generated a modern interpretation of these Vanitas motifs, which slowly evolves in a sequence combined with modern motifs that reflect on the transience of life as it appears in the contemporary world. In our times, human transience looks different than in the Baroque period. When a person is gone, they have left behind masses of waste that often remain for hundreds of years. In this way, the work encourages reflection on the environmental footprint that contemporary humans leave behind.

Visually the artwork is hyper-detailed and evolves in a slow moving endless zoom. The size of the image and music fills the room with light and sound; it is overwhelming, inflated and flamboyant; Baroque in a modern way.