“Tonight I came back to the hotel alone; the other has decided to return later on. The anxieties are already here, like the poison already prepared (jealousy, abandonment, restlessness). The silence of this huge hotel is echoing, indifferent, idiotic (faint murmur of draining bathtubs). Anxiety mounts; I observe its progress, like Socrates chatting (as I am reading) and feeling the cold of the hemlock rising in his body; I hear it identify itself, moving up, like an inexorable figure, against the background of the things that are here.”

― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (1977) 

Alex Hunter takes us on an uncanny luxury trip via generative AI, in this case fed with images of the Hotel Bayerischer Hof and private portraits from the artist’s personal circle. 

These days, travel has more to do with the sharing economy and is shaped by algorithms, but the allure of the static hotel, though its function may be unclear and its future uncertain, remains. Why is that? Maybe it’s the glamour of afterparties with no consequences, of brief encounters with travelers in the same tax bracket, against a backdrop of luxury and discretion.  Sometimes, anonymous and transient hotel rooms can carry memories more powerful than a home well lived in.

Neither a home nor a hell, the hotel is both cozy and unsettling–liberating and stifling. Freedom is disorienting. Everything has a price, everything disappears. And you, you are in between. What remains is the feeling of having been close to something. Close enough, but always wanting more.