“The New Romantics” is an installation and augmented reality art piece created by Patrick Lichty and Negin Ehtesabian. They are an artist couple and collaborative duo based in Weimar, Germany, and Winona, Minnesota. 

The artwork reflects their life in the “third space” of Weimar, Germany, exploring identity and place through AI avatars and 3D scans of local artifacts. This connects with the historical legacy of German Romanticism and philosophers/artists like Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche, and Liszt who lived in Weimar. Lichty and Ehtesabian see themselves as modern-day New Romantics within this context.

 

The piece also draws on the Persian concept of “your chair is green” when someone is missed, meaning grass grows in their absence. This idea is incorporated metaphorically into the work as a “Green Room” where the artists await being reunited, which recently just happened in the first week of June.