Installationsansicht: Cordula Ditz, They Speak to Us in Dreams, Kunsthaus Hamburg 2024, Foto: Antje Sauer

Cordula Ditz’s THEY SPEAK TO US IN DREAMS, is a visionary exploration of the erasure of women from art history, presented as a surrealistic fairy tale. Combining meticulous research with new AI technologies, this 44-minute video and sound installation sheds light on how female artists have been marginalized or forgotten over the centuries.

Ditz’s decision to work with AI builds on her long-standing use of found footage to highlight and uncover hidden histories and question our perception, setting the stage for a deeper exploration of collective memory and historical erasure. By using AI generators, she extends this practice into a new realm, positioning these technologies as collective memory agents capable of assimilating vast amounts of cultural and historical data. AI is the tool here to access collective memory. Through this approach, Ditz continues her investigation into the mechanisms of historical erasure and the potential of AI to amplify the vacancies in written history.

In recent years, the artist has been conducting research into a long-neglected topic: women who pursued artistic careers in the past centuries but have received little attention in art history to this day. As early as 1550, the Florentine art historian Giorgio Vasari published “The Lives of the Artists” – the first publication to document artists’ biographies. Alongside hundreds of male artists, he only mentioned four female artists. Four hundred years later, E. H. Gombrich’s standard work “The Story of Art” failed to provide a single reference to a woman. Even in the 16th edition from 1995, only one female artist is mentioned. In actual fact, women only occupy a marginal space in recorded history. Their contributions have in part been systematically suppressed in historical records around the world. The vast majority of surviving sources were written by men about men, and this phenomenon subsists in the digital age. For instance, in 2023, still only 18 percent of English-language articles on Wikipedia covered biographies of women, and only around 20 percent of all articles were written by female authors.

THEY SPEAK TO US IN DREAMS uses the flawed nature of AI as a form of representation for lost memories. The entire animation and soundtrack were generated using AI tools, with three different AI systems contributing to the final piece. The project began with a text-to-image generator, which Ditz utilized to create several thou- sand images based on written prompts. These images became the foundation for the subsequent phase, where a video generator was employed. Many of the resulting videos were generated through text prompts, while others were created by using the generated images as visual prompts in combination with textual inputs. This iterative process yielded several thousand videos, of which around 2,000 were carefully selected and edited into the final animation.

The soundtrack was created in a similarly experimental and labor-intensive way with Ditz using a text-to-music generator to produce over 500 AI-generated compositions. These pieces were curated and integrated into the video to complement its dreamlike and haunting atmosphere.

The visual style of THEY SPEAK TO US IN DREAMS evokes a fairy-tale sensibility, combining elements reminis- cent of Disney animation and Japanese anime. The vivid colors, fantastical imagery, and soft, fluid motions imbue the work with a dreamlike quality. Characters and scenes emerge with a surreal blend of charm and unease. This fairy-tale aesthetic not only draws viewers into the narrative but also juxtaposes the haunting themes of erasure and memory with an unexpected sense of whimsy while using also the flawed unstable imagery produced by the AI.

The animation features several striking and symbolic scenes that emphasize the plight and eventual resurgence of female artists. In one particularly haunting sequence, the women are depicted being pulled into the ‘swamp- lands of oblivion’—a dark and murky space consisting of masses of gigantic books in an dystopian surrounding - symbolizing the invisibility of women in art history. This imagery captures the suffocating weight of being forgotten, as the artists are submerged and lost to the mire of a male-dominated narrative in form from a mass of haunting male art historians writing them out of history. In another scene, the heads of female artists transform into pages of ancient books, symbolizing their relegation to forgotten archives. The books themselves appear to dissolve into a dark, fluid landscape, evoking the fragility of historical memory.

The initial image of *They Speak to Us in Dreams* references the painting “Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes” by Marie Denise Villers (1774–1821), a symbol of the historical misattribution and erasure of women’s contributions to art. A reproduction of this painting was featured on the front cover of the 1971 ARTnews issue that published Linda Nochlin’s famous essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” The painting was once considered ‘one of the great masterpieces of all time’ by twentieth-century art historians, and the Metro- politan Museum of Art acquired it in 1917 for $200,000, attributing it to Jacques-Louis David, the leading male artist of Neoclassicism. However in the 1940s, it was reattributed to Constance Charpentier (1767–1849), and in 1996, it was finally attributed to the lesser-known female artist Marie Denise Villers (1774–1821). This case study highlights the frequent misattribution and erasure of women’s contributions to art.

Ditz also uses the stereotypes generated by the AI. Men are depicted as caricatures of success—shown on yachts, surrounded by champagne and luxury, and amid a downpour of money, they represent the stereotypical image of the successful male artist and his support system in form from wealthy often male collectors.

The tone shifts in the latter part of the film, where the story takes on a triumphant and magical quality. The female artists, liberated through the writing of young female historians, emerge from a portal riding on oversized paintbrushes. This whimsical and empowering imagery, reminiscent of both Harry Potter’s broomstick flights and the iconic figures of witches. This imagery underscores their reclamation of creative agency and the impor- tance of rewriting history to restore their rightful place in the collective memory.

The video installation functions as a narrative of liberation for these women artists, linking their reemergence into collective memory with broader societal implications. It highlights the transformative power of revisiting and rewriting history, offering a hopeful vision of how cultural narratives can evolve to include those previously erased.

The animated protagonists draw on numerous historical role models, such as Georgiana Houghton (1814– 1884), Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), and Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750). Houghton had developed her own abstract imagery around 1865—more than 40 years before Kandinsky became famous as the inventor of abstraction. Hilma af Klint adopted her own abstract position years before Kandinsky, yet both artists found little recognition during their lifetimes. In contrast, Rachel Ruysch was internationally successful during her time, with her paintings fetching almost twice the price of Rembrandt’s, and her works have remained in the collections of major museums to this day. Yet in most art-history books she is not even mentioned.

The expansive installation at Kunsthaus Hamburg evokes a haunting atmosphere in the exhibition hall: a large-format video projection and soft whispers emanating from the corners.These whispers are women’s voices whispering the names of forgotten artists from different centuries, accompanied by flickering light strings hanging from the ceiling. This motif, recurring in Ditz‘s oeuvre, the electric failure symbolizes the invisible - in the form of spirits - a moment familiar from horror movies. However, concurrently, it interrogates the patriarchal narrative of mastery and perfection. The interplay of light, sound, and imagery evokes both the spectral pres- ence of these women and their resurgence into cultural awareness.

The soundtrack complements this visual style echoing the emotive qualities often found in Disney scores, combining atmospheric effects with power pop hymns - thereby deepening the immersive quality of the work. Together, the visuals and soundscape create an environment that feels both otherworldly and intimately familiar, inviting viewers to engage with its themes on a visceral level.

The video is both technologically fascinating and a meditation on historical memory, By leveraging AI’s ability to reinterpret and reconstruct fragmented narratives, the work addresses systemic erasure and promotes inclusivity in the stories we tell. The use of AI’s inherent flaws and distortions mirrors the fragmented and incomplete narratives surrounding women in art history. In THEY SPEAK TO US IN DREAMS Ditz resurrects the stories of forgotten female artists who have been consigned to oblivion. She also critiques the mechanisms of historical memory that have excluded them. By blending historical research with speculative storytelling and AI-generated artistry, she underscores the necessity of revisiting and reformulating history.