Deer Hunter is an assemblage of archival footage, family home videos, and a speculative form of documentary produced using generative AI. The work explores masculinity across past, present, and future through the artist's relationship to the men in his family: Italian immigrants fleeing fascism, who arrived in America in the early twentieth century, his terminally ill godfather, and his newborn son. By returning to Italy to film in the geography his ancestors once departed, the work traces a circular movement between origin and destination. The promise of America — once pursued through migration — reappears as both inheritance and burden, revealing how displacement, aspiration, and nationalism shape inherited notions of masculinity.

The film experiments with a hybrid form of generative filmmaking in which a synthetic animal is introduced into documentary landscape footage. An American white-tailed deer is generated using a custom model trained specifically on the species, then composited into the first and last frames of an existing shot. AI reconstructs the intervening sequence, interpolating the animal across frames while preserving the original camera movement, lighting, and environment. Generative sequences place the deer within Rome's Eur district — known for its monumental Fascist-era architecture — introducing a species that does not belong to the filmed environment and producing moments of ecological fiction: scenes that appear observational yet are constructed through machine learning.
The white-tailed deer occupies a central position throughout the film — at once an object of regarded beauty and a target for violence, particularly among men. Its seeming ubiquity in the United States makes it a subject almost every American has a relationship to. These generative sequences are juxtaposed with footage from a 1970 National Rifle Association film featuring an "American Hunter" reading from José Ortega y Gasset's Meditations on Hunting (1942) — a text ideologically at odds with the organization using it, deployed to lend intellectual cover to over a century of lobbying for gun access, at a cost that has left the United States with a gun homicide rate twenty-six times higher than that of other high-income countries. The voice and likeness of the "American Hunter" are used to generate additional sequences that weave historical and contemporary temporalities together. Passages chosen and assembled by the artist trace a search for closeness made possible only through violence. Calm and assured, the "American Hunter" narrates his own demise — his bravado and assumed mastery of the natural order intact — while his very existence is produced by a technology accelerating toward environmental and humanitarian catastrophe.
The artist's childhood home videos form the film's emotional core, connecting the viewer to a real landscape and a real deer. In them, men in the artist’s family document themselves through the technologies of their time, tracking a whitetail through forests. The artist's own childhood voice can be heard as he reaches toward a hunting tradition that stretches across his lineage — drawn into a performance of masculinity that the film simultaneously inhabits and undoes.
What the film ultimately asks is whether inheritance can be witnessed without being repeated. In staging this inquiry through generative AI, Deer Hunter knowingly implicates its own methods — the technology that reconstructs the deer, resurrects the hunter, and interpolates the past is the same technology reshaping ecological and social futures. Moving between the documentary and the generated, the remembered and the reconstructed, the film traces the distance between men through the performance of masculinity, a country and its myth, a deer in the forest, and a deer that was never there. It does not stand outside this condition, it—and by association— we, do not receive absolution, only responsibility.

This video work was made possible through an Affiliated Artist Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome awarded by the Savannah College of Art and Design. Technological production support was provided by the Krea AI platform. Sound design by Tomas Ornelas. Musical composition by Spurge Carter. 

Andrew Herzog (US) is an interdisciplinary artist whose medium-agnostic practice examines the constructed boundaries between humanity and the natural world — engaging the perceived liminal space between human and nonhuman life across personal and species-level temporalities. Fatherhood and caregiving have increasingly shaped his practice, informing investigations into masculinity and its role in the compartmentalization of human life from the natural world — traced through lineage, history, and the ecological conditions of the Anthropocene. Drawing on a background in creative technology and design, he develops accessible formal and conceptual languages through familiar materials and circular methodologies. His projects invite audiences to reconsider their relationship to one another and to the natural world.

One of the fault lines in democracies now descending toward collapse is nationalism: its exceptionalism, supremacist logic, delusions of grandeur, and the militarization and weaponization of patriotism. These political effects are precisely what propel the world’s largest democracy through increasingly fascistic mechanisms, accelerating its fragmentation. In Deer Hunter, Andrew Herzog channels this historical tension through a deeply personal lens. His grandfather fled Mussolini’s Italy for the United States, and the film traces a return to Rome, specifically to the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, the monumental architectural symbol of Italian Fascism.
Using AI-generated imagery, archival material, and family footage, Herzog stages a haunting portrait of a white-tailed deer wandering through the stark white facades of the palazzo and its surrounding landscape. In the film, a representative of the National Rifle Association introduces the animal as an “Ambassador to Italy,” positioning it as the face of America itself. Poetic, restrained, and quietly radical, the work becomes both a human and animal study of masculinity and nationalist mythmaking. AI functions here not merely as a tool, but as a conceptual bridge, linking fascist Italy with the authoritarian imaginaries of the contemporary United States through the symbolic figure of the white-tailed deer.

Exceptionally precise, politically incisive, and artistically elegant, Deer Hunter confronts the cyclical return of authoritarianism while turning its gaze across both America and Europe. The film captures the present moment with unusual clarity, reaffirming the enduring warning that “America’s chickens come home to roost.”