Rob and Nick Carter turn Monet’s Parliament into a 43-minute film

Rob and Nick Carter’s Transforming Houses of Parliament occupies a framed monitor, but its other measurement is 43 minutes. The 2026 film takes Claude Monet’s Parliament series as its starting point and plays on a loop.[2]

The piece is part of the artists’ London exhibition Transforming: the Complete Works 2009–26, running until 30 October. The new cycle uses AI under human direction, following an earlier series made with computer-generated imagery. A different tool has entered an existing artistic preoccupation: making paintings unfold in time.[1]

A painting becomes an interval

The reference is Monet’s Le Parlement series, from about 1899–1905. Here, changes unfold in sequence: what someone sees depends on the point the loop has reached.[2]

Transforming Interior, also from 2026, places a 42-minute film inside a framed iPad. Based on Anna Ancher’s Interior. Brøndum’s Annex, from around 1920, the object measures 34.8 by 31.7 centimetres.[3]

The long loop came first

The Carters date Transforming Still Life Painting to 2009–12 and give it a three-hour loop. Based on Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder’s Vase with Flowers in a Window, it was designed, they explain, to reward sustained looking without becoming quickly familiar.[4]

The Mauritshuis records the resulting video as a gift from the artists in 2013. A museum associated with the original painting also collected this later transformation of it.[5]

That history changes how the AI work can be understood. Slow transformation was already the artistic aim. The current exhibition describes the new films as products of extensive prompting, manual intervention and selection from frame to frame. AI is being used within a practice that already had a reason to make an image move slowly.[1]

Two kinds of time in one frame

A painting lets a viewer choose how long to examine each part; a film also supplies its own pace. The Carters combine those arrangements in a framed image that keeps changing while someone decides whether to stay. The duration belongs to the artwork; the attention belongs to the person looking.[2][4]

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