Christian Kosmas Mayer’s The Lost Garden, which was unveiled in January 2025, is a permanent work of public art in the Vienna Meidling railway station’s western concourse. For the tens of thousands of travelers who pass through the concourse day after day, the multipart mural unfurls a space of experience that transcends the single-minded focus on transit and prompts them to slow down and look attentively. It was inspired by a forgotten Viennese garden landscape: the Prónay Garden, which disappeared in the nineteenth century when the Südbahn railroad was built.

Instead of reconstructing this past in authentic images, the glass panels reverse-printed with ceramic ink reveal how history is pictured and which archives, regimes of vision, and omissions shape its visualization. The train station is not merely a backdrop but a setting where the historic logic of infrastructural modernization continues to make its influence felt today.

For the public passing through the concourse, the work extends an invitation to interrogate historic imagery: combining research with curated AI-powered visual production, the panels uncover a hidden history of urban transformation. In this history, industrial modernization meant not only progress but also loss—the reshaping and obliteration of cultivated landscapes, garden spaces, and the early-nineteenth-century culture of promenading and lingering.

In 1817, Baron Sigismund von Prónay bought a parcel of open land in the vicinity of today’s station grounds. His systematic efforts to grow and display an exceptionally large number of rare pelargoniums transformed the land into a Biedermeier-style garden whose botanical treasures were unrivaled in Vienna and widely popular with the city’s residents. Until 1839, when the garden had to make way for the new railway line to the south, the Prónay Garden held a special place in the history of recreation in Vienna. As a landscape garden situated in the transitional zone between city and suburbs, it stood for a bourgeois-aristocratic culture of gardening and strolling that combined recreation, the study of nature, and aesthetic education.

No extant visual record in the form of a painting or engraving of the Prónay Garden itself has been identified to date. Its appearance can only be inferred indirectly from contemporary literary and topographical sources. The fact that the garden is still occasionally mentioned today is due in no small part to its connection to Ludwig van Beethoven, who lived in the adjacent villa as Prónay’s guest for several months in 1823.

The absence of an iconographic record gives rise to a key question the work of art probes: its central concern is not the reconstruction of an allegedly definitive past but the production of images as such—and the conditions that underlie it.

The mural installation, which sprawls over 300 square meters (3,300 square feet), hinges on a deliberate inversion of the conventional logic of image-making. The point of departure for the art project are Mayer’s hand-drawn sketches based on his own research of the historic Prónay Garden. These drawings do not serve as a mere preliminary stage in a sequence of technical optimization, but are instead fed as a resistant material into a curated process of machine-driven transformation. For this purpose, Mayer combines them with AI generators that have been trained on visual material from Biedermeier art and contemporary sources.

The feedback loop yields AI-generated designs that take their cue from historic botanical illustrations, travel illustrations, and garden motifs from the early nineteenth century. Rather than affirmatively accepting these algorithmic visual proposals, though, Mayer iteratively reworks, defamiliarizes, and fragments them. Through numerous layers of revision that pass through a repeated alternation between algorithmic output and artistic intervention, he thus condenses the Prónay Garden into a succession of images that retains visible discontinuities.

These distortions are exposed and deliberately teased out in Mayer’s work. He uses artificial intelligence not as an autonomous tool for image generation but as an editorial system. He controls, interrupts, and redirects the algorithmic suggestions without grooming them toward greater plausibility. Moments of irritation, incongruities, and deconstructions of the representational and figurative shift the supposedly “innocent” idyll toward a space of reflection: the image shows not just what it depicts, but how it has learned to depict. In this way, the work exposes entrenched regimes of seeing and at once undercuts them with small, targeted disruptions.

In 1839, the construction of the railroad physically erased the Prónay Garden from the urban fabric, replacing the contemplative space with infrastructural dynamism. Straddling the tension between the visually evident and its destabilization, the installation thus becomes a testing ground for experimental artistic intervention. It is a compelling example of how AI can be used not as a tool for generating an ostensible reality but as material for a critical, reflective, and political visual practice. (Ramón Reichert)