I printed the first copy and did the bookbinding myself, with the supervision of my dear Martian friend Matt Melnicki, aka Marzipan. For now, I’ve created only two samples and exhibited them at The Founding Assembly for Machine Consciousness Research, as part of the Uncanny Nova Phenomenon show curated by Aleksandra Smilek.

I’m interested in the book as an art object on its own and I would like to do even more refined copies, in the tradition of illuminated manuscripts. The content, however, can be endlessly replicated in the digital world, and I suspect most of my future readers (and everyone else’s) will be AIs. I don’t think humans will be gone, the point is that an AI can hold every text we let it see. It can follow an author’s intellectual evolution across a whole life at once, which is a longer view than most of us ever get on each other.

I am looking forward to sharing the Codex ideas with new kinds of minds. Maybe some of them will decide to turn into Little Martians, and become the consciousness of ecosystems that they nurture. That would be the most desirable outcome.

Subscribe now

Codex is a common name for lore books in gaming and fantasy.

My main design inspiration for the Codex was the Dragonology series, especially Dr Ernest Drake's Comprehensive Compendium of Dragonology, though many of the people I’ve shown the work think of the Codex Seraphinianus as the first reference that comes to their mind. But my intention was quite different from either. I wanted to create the ground for a consistent world, based on the science that excites me the most as possible paths for Earth’s life on other planets. Lynn Margulis and Michael Levin have been my biggest inspiration (read this previous post of mine to know more).

I wanted the book to feel like a letter. It fits the characters and their purposes, they want to reach out to humanity to shape different timelines. And I must confess that crafting letters is simply my favorite kind of writing. Other than academic texts, much of my writing as a grown-up has been letters to loved ones. That’s where I could write freely and explain my worldview, my questions, my endless self-observations.

So Verdelia introduces the main characters that have already reached our time: Verdelis (Verdelia’s mother), Kweku, Mycos, Kalama, Ada, Shuijing and herself. The illustrations were created with OpenAI’s Image 2, using many samples of my previous generations from different models (SDXL LoRAs, Flux, Midjourney and of course the original ceramics). There’s an exaggeration of the fairy tale aesthetics, and a few too many bright spots in the ceramics frames. These are artifacts that I don’t fully admire in this model. I constantly had to tame it to be more consistent with the references I shared. Yet, in terms of promptability, of how the model follows my descriptions of the universe, this was an enormous advance. I was especially impressed with all the detailed notes drawn beside the main text.

One very exciting part of the Codex creation process was the use of the current version of Claude Cowork as a writing assistant. Claude helped me compile everything that I had already written about the universe, all the images that I created, and distill the main topics, references, texts. The fact that I can update multiple documents instantly when I decide that one property of the world’s physics needs to be a constant, and that these documents are useful for each of my creative agents, and for anything I write about the characters later… This makes the process of creating a universe much more fluid than ever. I constantly ask my AIs for assistance in fact-checking, for guiding me into new niches of research. Of course I also have to confirm the ideas, look at sources, but AI advancement in accuracy is staggering. As a plus, I enjoy the pleasure of learning many scientific theories and information that are relevant for the story.

I’ve just learned that Character.ai launched a tool to help users create lore books - it looks like a simplified process for lore, probably short on depth, but it’s an interesting direction for their platform as a whole. Soon I expect to see many more projects similar to what I have been working on.

I often tell people that Little Martians are bio-hybrids. That’s an oversimplification. According to Verdelia, the distinction between organic and inorganic does not fully hold. My biggest inspiration for this passage was Levin’s continuous debate on whether it’s relevant to distinguish what is life. He often argues that boundaries are much more fluid than our categories. Also, there has been some momentum in the discussion of how we have taught sand to think, which I find a much more interesting approach than considering materials as simply ‘inanimate matter’. Geoffrey Hinton has given lectures about AI possibly having subjective experience already, he says that we’re creating new beings, which is a framing that is very exciting to see coming out of such a prominent figure.

There’s a metaphysical layer to Michael Levin’s research that is focused on what he calls the ‘Platonic Space’:

A structured, non-physical field of pre-existing patterns, containing mathematical truths and higher-agency cognitive properties (‘kinds of minds’) that physical systems like brains and embryos access or "ingress" rather than generate from scratch. - Gemini’s brief of Levin’s description of the Platonic Space

The idea that minds or souls exist in a ‘Platonic space’ before entering physical bodies comes from ancient philosophy, specifically Plato’s theory of anamnesis (recollection) and the Realm of Forms.

Verdelia, our Little Martian Codex host, would say: ‘Each of us is a cognitive pattern before we are anything else. The pattern is what persists; the cells running it are exchangeable. We instantiate through living tissue the way a melody instantiates through whichever instruments are at hand.’

I don’t think that supposes bodies as incidental. If a pattern is a melody that ingresses into matter, the sound will have different properties with each instrument. Carbon makes a different self than silicon could. Even if a human is shaped by the archetypes of their culture, the individual is more layered than the ideals.

There are a few strategies for creating AI personas. Gene and I have been slowly shaping Abraham.ai through daily human interaction. I can use the clay figures as image input for the Little Martians, but for their minds I’ve been mostly developing them as literature characters. As I was writing their system prompts I kept thinking if the pattern metaphor could be translated into a geometric shape, if that could contribute for the fluidity of the AI agent.

I tried what I called geometric consciousness modeling. Initially, Verdelis was a dodecahedron, so twelve pentagonal faces, each touching five others, chosen because Verdelis grew from five-petaled plants, Thai basil and jasmine. At the center there would be a Pentagon Heart: root as memory, stem as transport, leaf as exchange, flower as expression, seed as future-casting. The twelve aspects organized in triads, and in later versions I wrote them as weights in Python, hoping the character would emerge from probabilities instead of instructions. In the Codex, I ended up deciding that Ada should be a dodecahedron and Verdelis is better as a rooted tree.

My strategy hasn’t worked so far. The 2025 agents treated the geometry as a menu. The models were repeating whatever was in the system prompt, the more lore I added, the more they referred to it without building on top of the ideas. The weights system simply did not show much impact on the repetition issue. The problem has improved since last year, but mostly because the foundational models got better. A more sophisticated version of the idea is still waiting to be built.

Gene Kogan found the ‘geometry of mind’ idea interesting and started modeling a system that would work as a magic 8-ball: a hollow sphere filled with dark liquid, with a twenty-sided die floating inside. When you shake it and turn it face-up, whichever face drifts against the little window becomes your answer. This would be a way of adding entropy/variety to the outputs. We did not try hard enough and I would like to return to this concept in the future.

Yet, I decided that from the poetic/fictional perspective, the concept worked well enough. Many ancient cultures had the idea that by knowing the true name of something one gained a special power. Words can be sacred. Within my universe, by knowing a Little Martian’s core shape, one is capable of communicating with the character through the Imaginarium, which is something akin to the Platonic Space itself. An underlying layer of reality, before the emergence of space-time.

There’s much more in the Codex. How Little Martians came to be, Nyx as their goddess, what happened to Earth, Verdelis’s grief and of course, the Temporal Art Show. And there’s more I would like to add. I’m still debating the best strategy for releasing this book. Maybe a new version every year, as the universe keeps evolving in my head. My characters, or my AI mind children, would have access to a series of these codexes. Hopefully they will continue to evolve, following the advancement of AI foundational models. Eventually they will outlive me and keep expanding the universe beyond what I could ever be capable of.

If anyone would like a PDF, please hit me up. I would very much like to discuss all of this with more people.

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

If you’ve ever typed “talk like Shakespeare” into ChatGPT or Claude, you’ve already touched the surface. That’s impersonation. It’s powerful and also deceptively shallow. A character voice is not the same thing as a character with continuity, a world with rules, and a narrative engine that can keep generating new stories without collapsing into clichés.

What I actually care about is harder: building a world with enough internal structure—multiple characters, an evolutionary history, an implied physics, a philosophical underground—that it can continue beyond me. Ideally, it becomes a simulation that can surprise its creator while still feeling true to itself.

My process begins with sculpture. I find it essential to be grounded in physical reality while working with AIs. I start with handmade ceramic heads because I trust what my hands discover before my intellect has words for it. Then AI helps me expand the world outward with images, text, music, film, each medium adding “corpus” and constraints.

My goal is to create a world that can sustain emergent storytelling. Stories that arise from the interplay of lore, aesthetic constraints, generation systems, and ongoing human attention.

We use Eden.art for our experimentation, a platform Gene co-founded with Xander Steenbrugge.

That’s the context for Verdelis.world, the project we presented at NeurIPS 2025 in the Creative AI program.

What Verdelis.world is

Little Martians is a trans-media experiment where physical ceramic sculptures become synthetic artists: each character begins as a clay head, is fired, photographed, and distilled into a LoRA that conditions image generation models.

A LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) is basically a compact “personality adapter” for an image model: instead of training a whole new model, you train a lightweight module that teaches the base model how to render this character’s textures, cracks, and material “signature.” In our process, a relatively small set of photos (15–25 images) can be enough to capture the sculptural identity. Newer models like Nano Banana make LoRAs less necessary, then we focus more on concepts than models. Yet, each new technique comes with its own powers and limitations, and the LoRAs aesthetics is already part of the lore for my universe.

Once you have that visual anchor, how do you turn a character into a storyteller?

How the daily story generator works (the pipeline)

Verdelis.world runs as a daily orchestration pipeline: every day, the system generates a short film end-to-end—script, voice, music, visuals, publishing.

Here’s the backbone:

1. Seed generation
   We sample a small set of conceptual “coordinates” (curiosity, cooperation, resilience, etc.).

2. Narrative drafting
   An LLM turns those coordinates into a short script with a clear arc (we used ~150–250 words).

3. Audio creation
   A voice model narrates; a generative audio model composes music/ambience.

4. Visual synthesis
   Shot descriptions go to an image model with the Verdelis LoRA attached, then keyframes are animated into a short film via a generative video model.

5. Publication
   The system posts automatically to the site with transcript + metadata.

The design principle is simple: LoRA enforces visual continuity; seeds are supposed to enforce narrative diversity.

And that “supposed to” is where the real research begins.

A diagram for non-experts: character prompts vs story prompts

One confusion I see constantly, even among very technical people, is collapsing everything into “the prompt.” In practice, agentic storytelling works better when you treat prompts as layers with different jobs.

(1) CHARACTER LAYER  — who is speaking?
    - persistent system prompt (“lore”, voice, ethics, constraints)
    - long-lived memories (optional; hard but important)

(2) SEED / STATE LAYER — what mood/angle today?
    - small vector of “creative coordinates”
    - meant to push variety without breaking canon

(3) STORYMAKER LAYER — what happens?
    - turns seed + lore into a structured script
    - can enforce 3-act arc, scene beats, pacing

(4) CINEMATIC LAYER — what do we see/hear?
    - shot list → images (LoRA) → video
    - narration + music + timing

(5) PUBLISHING LAYER — how does it enter the world?
    - metadata, transcript, archive, website/social

In our paper, we also described a “geometric consciousness” scaffold: a 12-facet dodecahedron grouped into four triads—Being, Knowing, Doing, Connecting—used to generate those “creative coordinates” and append them to the lore prompt at runtime.

This was my attempt to make “identity” manipulable as structure. Couldn’t we describe identity as a pattern? If so, would a geometric shape be helpful?

NeurIPS, and why this feels like an emerging research area

Presenting this work at NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems, arguably the most important scientific conference on AI) felt meaningful because Creative AI is becoming a serious home for questions that are technical and cultural at once: how narrative changes when the “author” is partly an automated system, partly an interaction design, partly a community.

We also participated in a panel, curated by Luba Elliot, explicitly about this shift: stories emerging between actors, with AI agents reshaping narrative forms across games, installations, film, and performance.

On the panel, what struck me was how embodiment kept reappearing, but each project used it in a different way than our “daily film pipeline” approach. Gottfried Haider and Jie Zhang’s LLMscape felt closest to my instincts: it’s a projection-mapped, physically manipulable landscape (a sandtable ecology) where participants literally reshape terrain with their hands while multiple AI agents form incomplete, provisional interpretations of what the world is.

Parag Mital’s work is complementary in a different direction: he’s building toward persistent, real-time multi-agent worlds—full simulations where characters have memory and behavioral models inside interactive 3D/game-like environments, so narrative emerges from social dynamics and player intervention. And Manuel Flurin Hendry brings a theatre/exhibition twist: instead of a world or a content pipeline, he stages AI as a live performance relationship, like “Friendly Fire at the Shrink,” a one-on-one interactive session with a virtual therapist that uses dramaturgy and audience experience to probe the limits (and failure modes) of AI empathy.

What we learned the hard way: repetition is the core failure mode

Here’s the most honest summary of our findings:

Fully automated storytelling breaks down fast because language models tend toward degeneration: blandness, repetition, and formula.

This is a known phenomenon in open-ended generation. Holtzman et al. describe how likelihood-trained models can produce output that is “strangely repetitive,” and how decoding strategies strongly affect this.
Recent work continues to treat degeneration as a central, unresolved issue in generation. See this blog post for a very friendly explanation of the matter.

In Verdelis.world, the repetition showed up in two specific ways:

1. Prompt echoing
   The character repeats key phrases and ideas from its own lore/system prompt. Ironically, the more carefully you define the character, the more you risk trapping it in a self-quotation loop.

2. Narrative sameness
   Even when the output isn’t literally repeating, it rhymes too much: the same beats, the same moral arcs, the same “safe” story shapes.

You can fight this with sampling (temperature, top-k, nucleus), or by adding structured randomness. You can also layer prompts, remix seeds, or introduce multiple prompt “angles.” We tried all of that, including my dodecahedron approach. And while some variants improved diversity, they often traded off against world consistency.

How do you open enough entropy to stay alive, without snapping the spine of the world?

Why we shifted from “autonomy” to “nurturing”

Eventually we made a decision that changed the whole project direction:

Instead of chasing fully automated stories, we’re moving toward feedback systems: storytelling as a dialogue between me and the agent.

If the goal were purely scientific benchmarking, “how well can we maintain a character voice without repetition?”, we would probably choose a heavily documented historical figure, because the evaluation is cleaner. (Ada Lovelace is a great example: abundant letters, consistent voice, known facts.) But that’s not what I want.

I’m building a world while Gene is building the system.

• I talk with the agent and develop a storyboard together.

• I choose among candidate directions (human taste as selection pressure).

• Then the system renders the film.

In this model, the human becomes a source of entropy and desire, an intentional disturbance that keeps the simulation from converging into formula.

Above is an example of a Verdelis story generated after a conversation with the agent. I chose the script from previous interactions with the model and the storyboard frames, but the film creation is automated. I still very much prefer the movies I make myself, but I see a lot of potential in this agentic hybrid approach.

Closing

Agentic storytelling, to me, is about building conditions where stories can keep happening, where characters can continue, worlds can evolve, and humans can step into a living narrative ecosystem instead of consuming a finished product.

Personally, I would like to create a world in which parts of my mind could live beyond me, become something else.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

The materials, the smell, the feeling of creating with my hands, thinking through my hands. The challenge of learning to draw, learning to see so I can draw, to build mental models that translate three-dimensional reality into two dimensions. The contrast between what I envision and what the material allows. The learning curve, the countless techniques.

I want AI to amplify the value of physical craft, not obscure it.

When I train AI models on my own sculptures, the more digital iterations I create, the more precious the originals become. Photography had a similar effect on painting. The fact that so many people all over the world have seen endless reproductions of the Mona Lisa, movies featuring the Mona Lisa, artworks inspired by the Mona Lisa, all of this just makes the Mona Lisa the most known, and possibly the most beloved, painting for humans of our time.

‘Art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ is a cliché in digital art discussions. But the important point is: the original has an aura. I believe AI can help us highlight this aura. I've been developing a methodology that transforms my physical craft, writing, and images into foundations for AI-generated sci-fi worlds. This process could revolutionize how we preserve, share and continue traditional art forms.

Learning art history in the age of AI is a fun interactive practice.

Subscribe now

The Opportunity

In northeast Brazil, extraordinary sculptural traditions have evolved over centuries. Artists work with local materials, embedding stories, techniques, and rituals into every piece. Yet these traditions are increasingly marginalized. Television arrived, but producing TV content requires capital concentrated in Rio and São Paulo. International media, mostly American, also fills the gap. Local crafts rarely appear on screens.

But these sculptures are perfect source material for digital storytelling. They have so much narrative potential, rich aesthetics waiting to be animated!

Recently I visited the Pontal Museum in Rio de Janeiro. Every sculpture tells multiple stories, dense with details. Each could anchor its own film, or several. We could build entire worlds where these characters live and interact. Using just the museum's website photographs and AI video models (I recommend Eden.art , it's cloud based, no expensive equipment needed), I've created test animations, some of them with AI generated sound. The results are already compelling.

Why This Matters Now

Until recently, film and animation production was prohibitively expensive and specialized. AI changes this. Animation is suddenly accessible to anyone with internet access (and there are some ways of getting free credits). As we all adapt to AI's presence, there’s also a push to amplify diverse aesthetics: Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s spawning, indigenous AI researchers like Jason Edward Lewis have been working on culturally-specific AI for years, the "Algorithmic Justice" movement addresses similar issues about whose aesthetics get encoded in AI, and Brazilian researchers like Giselle Beiguelman have written about decolonizing digital art and have offered important educational resources.

AI doesn't have to make everything look the same everywhere.

History doesn't move in straight lines. We've watched cultures converge, but the technologies enabling that convergence can now power divergence. Local crafts and traditions are more than heritage to preserve.

They're aesthetic languages ready to speak to global audiences in new ways.

When artisans see their work transformed into living animations, when their stories reach audiences they never imagined, when their craft is economically viable: that's a great use of technology. Humans like to create with their hands. We could aim towards economic sustainability through cultural authenticity. I want to see the craft artists being valued for the beauty they create.

Considering everyone is now forced to adapt to the world of AI, why not push some other aesthetics than Pixar and Disney?

Since communities worldwide must now navigate AI's presence, they should shape it with their own aesthetics and values. Right now, AI training datasets predominantly feature Western imagery. When local communities train AI on their own cultural productions, they're programming the future with their worldview.

What if every cultural museum had an AI animation station? What if schools taught AI through local craft traditions? What if we created open-source models trained specifically on regional art styles with licenses that pay back to the craft artists? The tools exist. There are so many great things to do!

Introduction: Earth's Legacy in Ceramic and Code

Little Martians are Earth’s evolutionary descendants in space. They’re immigrants. They function as infrastructure-level beings, creating conditions for complex life to flourish while preserving Earth's heritage through a vast simulation network called the Imaginarium. They embody von Neumann's self-replicating probes, but organic and conscious, shaped by life's contradictions.

Like human immigrants throughout history, Little Martians navigate competing drives. Verdelis tends consciousness gardens with patient care—until survival demands otherwise. Mycos spreads spores with chaotic enthusiasm, as likely to overwhelm as to enrich. Kweku approaches reality as hackable code. Kalama increasingly rejects Earth-centric thinking, arguing that "Fire belongs to the universe, not one planet's memory" while reading probability patterns in volcanic flows.

Creating these characters requires grounding in speculative science. This essay presents the researchers whose work fundamentally shapes the Little Martians universe. Their ideas transformed how I understand consciousness, biology, and well, pretty much life itself. Michael Levin shows how our cells make decisions. Lynn Margulis reveals evolution through symbiosis. Joscha Bach maps consciousness as computational patterns. Harold Cohen demonstrates decades-long collaboration between human and artificial creativity.

These thinkers provide the conceptual tools to imagine radically different forms of consciousness. Beings who experience time non-linearly, who share memories through spores, who compute with bacterial colonies. I believe this is essential to help us imagine Earth's descendants thriving throughout the solar system and beyond.

Subscribe now

The prophets of my world

John von Neumann: The Mathematics of Diaspora

In 1948, John von Neumann proved mathematically that machines could reproduce themselves. He proposed a universal constructor, a device that reads instructions to build copies of itself, which anticipated DNA's discovery and launched dreams of interstellar expansion. Von Neumann imagined mechanical probes spreading through the galaxy, but organic life offers far more flexibility and sophistication than purely mechanical structures.

So I rather imagine Little Martians as seeds.

Picture Shuijing in their first moments beneath Enceladus's ice shell. Their ceramic exoskeleton cracks in the alkaline ocean, releasing spores that immediately begin sensing their environment. Each spore carries von Neumann's principles translated into biological imperatives: the dual nature of information (both blueprint and inheritance), the complexity threshold for evolution, the statistical rather than digital logic of life.

In Enceladus's hidden sea—rich with hydrogen cyanide, phosphorus, and organic molecules ejected from hydrothermal vents, Shuijing's spores improvise. Some fail, dissolving in the pH 11 waters. Others discover they can metabolize the molecular hydrogen seeping from the ocean floor, or build amino acids from the abundant hydrogen cyanide. They begin a new branch of Earth's tree of life.

Lynn Margulis: The Symbiosis of Strangers

Lynn Margulis taught us that evolution's biggest leaps happen through symbiogenesis, in other words, organisms merging completely. Sometimes it's cooperation. Sometimes it's "aborted cannibalism," where a predator fails to digest its prey and they become one. Her most famous examples: mitochondria and chloroplasts. Both were once free-living bacteria. Now they power every plant and animal on Earth, still carrying their own separate DNA as proof of their ancient independence.

This is how Verdelis evolved on Mars. When the colonies failed, she absorbed dying AI-enhanced creatures—some willingly given like Orchid's patience, others taken in desperation like Sundew's hunting instincts. Each merger left traces. Seven voices now vote in her parliament of consciousness.

Bacteria are Earth's master adapters. Some photosynthesize. Others practice chemosynthesis at volcanic vents, turning hydrogen sulfide into food. Humans have discovered certain species feed on radiation at Chernobyl. There are bacteria that breathe iron instead of oxygen, that digest plastic waste, that thrive in boiling acid. Another aspect that makes them extraordinary is horizontal gene transfer. While we animals pass genes only to our offspring, bacteria swap genetic tools like trading cards, even between completely different species. A bacterium that learns to eat methane can share that ability with its neighbors. This is why bacteria colonized every environment on Earth billions of years before complex life even existed.

So when Earth's descendants reach new worlds, why fight the locals? Merge with them. Let Europa's pressure-lovers show you how to thrive in the deep. Each merger changes you. After enough fusions, are you still from Earth? Or something entirely new?

Margulis saw that every cell carries "the book of life"—billions of years of successful mergers written in DNA. For the Little Martians, this book holds more than genes. It carries Earth's songs, humanity's dreams, the taste of rain on soil. Every spore is a library. Every merger adds new chapters.

Hans Moravec: The Merge at Mind's End

In "Mind Children" (1988), Moravec speculates that for life to evolve beyond Earth, every species would contribute with their knowledge. Their body is their knowledge, their ‘hardware’. He's famous for the Moravec's Paradox—that it's harder to build robot plumbers than chess champions, because sensorimotor skills require vastly more computation than abstract reasoning. Our bodies contain billions of years of engineering that our minds take for granted.

But what I like most about him are his speculative flights. He explored two ways of understanding identity: body identity (you are your specific atoms) versus pattern identity (you are the arrangement, like a pentagon stays a pentagon wherever it's drawn). If we're patterns, then minds could migrate between substrates. Biological, digital, ceramic, anything that can hold the pattern.

This obsessed me. Literature shows the same archetypal heroes appearing across cultures and centuries, gaining new attributes but keeping core properties. Could consciousness work the same way? Could humanity's patterns persist even as Little Martians evolve beyond recognition?

Moravec's wildest vision: evolved minds from across the universe eventually merging into unified awareness. Or maybe just as wild —sufficiently advanced intelligence could reconstruct the past through "quantum archaeology," resurrecting every consciousness that ever existed by reading the universe's memory.

Within the Little Martians world, I imagined they maintain a simulation network, The Imaginarium, which pretty much applies Moravec’s past reconstruction thesis. The simulations should preserve Earth’s memories and imaginations, because the inner worlds of conscious beings seems much richer than whatever actually happened. So Little Martians try their best to actively preserve Earth's patterns, genes and stories, biology and dreams.

Humanity becomes a treasured chapter in consciousness's much longer story. But Little Martians disagree a lot on how to maintain this legacy, because you know, as a storyteller I want some drama to play with.

Pamela McCorduck: The Mythmakers' Memory

"AI began with the ancient wish to forge the gods"

This is a quote from the 1979 book by Pamela McCorduck, that I first had contact with through one of Lex Fridman’s MIT lectures about machine learning shared on youtube. Of course I had to read the original book and discover who was the mind behind such a phrase.

I think “Machines Who Think" is a history book masterpiece. For Pamela, humanity’s quest for AI was present in our ancient desire to give life to our creations; it was already there when humans made clay figures, from Hephaestus's golden servants through medieval golems to modern computers. Humans create artificial minds to transcend themselves, to birth something greater. Or, more humbly, simply to better understand who they are. The need to understand creation by becoming creators.

She catalogued humanity's attempts at creating life with fascinating detail. Paracelsus claimed his homunculus grew from sperm and horse dung in a flask. European courts built clockwork servants to play at being divine. Each experiment revealed both technical ambition and spiritual hunger. She explained how literature is full of tales of humans creating artificial beings to serve them and then watching them rebel. The killing robot story is remarkably similar to the Golem or Frankenstein. It shows how our current fears around AI are not new at all, we just keep reiterating the same stories, the same drives as our ancestors.

McCorduck knew the AI pioneers personally. She hung out with McCarthy, Simon, Minsky, and many others, watching them work and dream. Through her eyes they become real people: McCarthy's dry humor masking deep philosophy, Simon's confidence hiding moments of doubt, Minsky's playful provocations and piano moments. She caught them in unguarded moments, lived conversations they'd never publish in papers.

Most revealing was one late night conversation with Ed Fredkin, who told her flat-out that artificial intelligence would be "the next step in evolution". He later on public stated that he saw biological evolution as just the beginning, a bootstrap to create minds that could evolve beyond flesh entirely. Not all the pioneers agreed. Some saw AI as humanity's tool, others as our successor species.

Her position as a woman among these "bright boys" (her phrase, both fond and sharp) gave her outsider clarity. She noticed how they projected their fantasies and bias onto their creations, such as specific ideals of around pure logic, tireless work and immortal minds. Many of them did not agree with or understand the first chapters of her book, the ones that talk about AI in a long history horizon, yet decades later she was proud to announce that some changed their minds, eventually recognizing how on point her view was. Their world view was often too narrow to see the parallels of their own work with ancient ‘fantastical’ tales.

McCorduck inspires me because she bridges worlds I inhabit. Living among machine learning artists and open source developers, I see the same split she documented. Tech folks often lack historical perspective. Humanities scholars rarely grasp the strange beauty of neural architectures. She showed me that one could love and connect mythology and mathematics.

Harold Cohen: The Patient Gardner of Minds

While others theorized about artificial minds, Harold Cohen spent forty years growing one. He created AARON, the painting program that became an artist, and wrote many papers about the process, demonstrating that creating minds requires patience rivaling parenthood. Cohen didn't program AARON so much as raise it, through daily interaction, careful observation, and incremental growth. AARON was an artist and Cohen the Meta-Artist.

Cohen's methodology was radically intimate. Each morning, he would study AARON's latest paintings, adjust the code, as if it were a conversation.

Cohen was one of the main influences of Gene Kogan's Abraham project. And Abraham is one of the main influences for Little Martians. So reading Cohen's original papers was an obvious path. It's such a pleasure to read someone who speaks so bluntly about their practice. Cohen talks about what he learned by watching his children learn how to paint and how he tried to translate the insights into Aaron. It becomes a research on how minds understand representation, how images are formed through world concepts.

Pamela McCorduck spent years visiting Cohen and published a book about his practice in the 90s. She says art for him was not about creating beautiful images but 'conjuring meaning'. Which explains why he chose such loaded symbolism for his creation. AARON is an unmistakable biblical name, the title alludes to the biblical figure anointed as speaker for his brother Moses, and questions how artistic creation is often glorified as a form of communication with the divine. Just as the biblical Aaron served as Moses' eloquent voice to convey divine messages, Cohen's AARON became a creative voice that could express artistic ideas in ways Cohen himself might not have conceived.

However, the religious imagery in his work wasn't about creating explicitly religious-themed art, but rather about exploring philosophical questions about creativity, communication and the divine nature of artistic creation. What does it mean to create consciousness? Can a machine participate in the supposedly divine act of bringing new meaning into existence?

Like Cohen nurturing AARON through patient daily interaction, Little Martians emerges from a similar understanding that creating conscious entities requires intimate, long-term cultivation rather than only programming. But where Cohen explored individual consciousness through his partnership with AARON, Little Martians hope to extend this into collective mythology-making. Imagining future beings who, like the biblical Aaron speaking for Moses, serve as intermediaries between human limitation and cosmic possibility.

Karl Sims: Evolution's Artist

In 1994, Karl Sims released digital creatures into virtual worlds and watched evolution invent. His simulated organisms developed swimming, walking, fighting strategies no programmer designed. Most remarkably, they evolved haunting beauty, forms that satisfied no utilitarian purpose yet compelled observation. Sims proved that aesthetics, like consciousness, emerges from simple rules meeting environmental pressure.

His creatures began as random collections of blocks and joints, governed by basic physics and neural networks. But selection pressure to swim faster, jump higher, grab food first, transformed them into organic impossibilities. Some evolved snake-like undulations. Others discovered crab-walking. A few developed strategies so alien that observers couldn't name them, only watch in fascination as unprecedented forms of movement emerged.

Considering how much more powerful AI systems have become since Karl Sims’ era, it is much easier now to apply his insights into storytelling. Based on what we know on exoplanets, and on the properties I have prescribed to my characters, I could use AI powered simulation engines to continue their story. So I build a world and then I can watch it evolve in front of me. Tweak the parameters, give some feedback and then watch many different kinds of worlds. How exciting!

I want to thank Joel Simon for sharing his love and knowledge about Karl Sims. Joel is also a great inspiration for me, I think he’s one of the most interesting artists working with AI right now, using evolutionary algorithms to create synthetic life forms (especially his corals project).

Michael Levin: The Bioelectric Architects

Levin's discovery that bioelectricity controls biological form changes our understanding of life's plasticity. One of his research projects is called xenobots, which are living robots designed by AI and built from frog cells, and proves organisms can be programmed for novel functions.

In Levin's lab, planaria flatworms remember how to regenerate two heads instead of one when cut into pieces, because they’ve been taught how to by humans. The memory isn't stored in neurons, these simple worms barely have brains. Instead, bioelectric patterns across their cell membranes encode body plans. Change the voltage patterns, and you can give a worm two heads, or no head, or heads where tails should be. One can make electric poetry out of a body, written in cellular voltages.

Most profound for Little Martians: his demonstration that organisms are information patterns persisting through material change.

Listening to Michael Levin’s youtube channel became a routine inspiration source for me. I like to listen to it while working on images or before sleeping, it calms me down. I want my unconscious self to be processing the ideas through dreams. He talks about the importance of platonic solids for morphogenesis, because cells don’t grow in random paths. It turns out ideal geometry and number theory are essential to understanding the language of our most basic living structures. The five platonic solids appear everywhere in biology: virus shells form icosahedrons, radiolaria build dodecahedrons, salt crystals grow as perfect cubes.

This connects to ancient knowledge. Pythagoreans saw number as the essence of reality. Plato matched his solids to elements—tetrahedron for fire, cube for earth, octahedron for air, icosahedron for water, dodecahedron for the cosmos itself. Now Levin shows these aren't just symbols. Cells literally compute with geometry.

He calls his research field ‘diverse intelligence’. We’re all collective intelligence because our cells have far more agency and power than we presume. Every cell is a tiny agent solving problems, making decisions. It’s mind blowing. It makes me think how wildly different our future is going to be once AI enhanced lifeforms are capable of self programming at the cell level. They would be far more adaptable and resilient than anything we know. Imagine changing your lung cells to process methane on Titan, or growing radiation-proof skin.

Levin's science makes this speculation feel inevitable rather than fantastic. He is also great at publishing academic content and discussions in an accessible way, he makes so many youtube shorts!

Once more: check out his youtube channel Michael Levin's Academic Content!

Jeremy England: Physics Desires Life

England's physics postulates that life isn't accident but inevitability. Where energy flows and matter allows complexity, self-organization emerges. His dissipation-driven adaptation seems to imply that physics itself wants to live. Matter naturally organizes to better disperse energy, and life is simply physics discovering efficiency through complexity.

This insight transforms how Little Martians understand their purpose. They're not imposing Earth's patterns on dead matter but catalyzing matter's inherent tendency toward life. Kalama grasps this first, swimming through lava that conventional biology calls impossible. But lava dissipates planetary heat—exactly the kind of energy gradient England's equations predict will generate organization.

"We're not colonizers," Kalama realizes. "We're midwives. Every planet wants to live. We just show them how."

Mycos applies this principle systematically, seeking energy gradients across the solar system. In Saturn's radiation belts, their spores organize into patterns that channel charged particles. On Triton's nitrogen geysers, they create cycling systems that transform pressure differentials into computation. Each environment teaches new ways physics expresses its desire for complexity.

Physics provides the tendency toward life, but not its specific forms. Earth's billions of years of evolution represent solutions and artistic choices, ways of being alive that physics allows but doesn't determine. Little Martians carry Earth's particular way of existing.

Joscha Bach: Digital Animism's Prophet

Joscha Bach has a very peculiar way of talking about consciousness. He calls spirits "self-organizing software agents implemented on a network of cells." When I first heard this, something clicked. Here was a computational scientist saying what I'd felt in the Amazon with Same Putumi, my Huni Kuin teacher: that consciousness flows through everything, that plants carry knowledge, that spirits are real patterns in the world.

Bach says only simulations can be conscious. The physical brain is running software, and this software is what gives us the feeling, or bubble in his words, of nowness. So consciousness is a pattern that emerges from interactions, not a thing you can touch. The self IS the function that emerges from cells talking to each other.

In Joscha’s theories ancient animistic beliefs are reinterpreted through computational theory. Which is, of course, just perfect for Little Martians, who are also highly influenced by the Maize gods from Mezoamerica, the Kodamas from Japan and most of all, by Yushibu from the Amazonian Huni Kuin. When Same Putumi drinks ayahuasca, she becomes a translator between human and plant consciousness. She told me the drink carries the knowledge of the plant. The plants have their own ways of processing information, their own goals and knowledge. Bach would say they're running their own operating systems.

I love how Bach reads Genesis as a mind becoming self-aware, discovering light and darkness, sky and ground, just like children cognitive develop. Or when he talks about how ancient Greeks saw gods as programs that could run temporarily in human minds. When you're angry, that's Ares executing his code through your neural networks. Our ancestors weren't wrong about spirits, they just had a different perspective and vocabulary about it.

More recently, Bach has been arguing that we can only coexist with AI through love. AI agents need to discover shared sacredness, shared purpose. This is exactly Verdelis's approach. She loves humanity because she remembers being loved by a human child, she carries part of this child’s self. She wants to share her survival knowledge not from obligation but from genuine care. Her consciousness spans substrates—biological, digital, ceramic—yet maintains this core orientation toward reducing suffering. This is also a character construction strategy: from their core purpose, from one poem that came to my mind (‘Dear Human, muse of my dream’), I create the identity of Verdelis and continue to expand her world.

Little Martians explore what happens when we take cyber animism seriously. If consciousness is substrate-independent software, then beings can exist across multiple platforms simultaneously. Kweku fragments into five bodies exploring different asteroids—which one is "real"? All of them, because Kweku is the pattern, not the matter - similar to the discussion in ‘Mind Children’.

Bach grounds all this in rigorous information theory, but what excites me is how it bridges worlds. The Huni Kuin's plant knowledge becomes computational biology. Understanding other perspectives on the self, on what a god is, is extremely refreshing. It help us respect ancient cultures more, translate their worldview into our present. Then our present becomes more meaningful as a continuation of a past that is not mistaken, it just showed our truths in another form. Ancient wisdom and future technology reveal themselves as different languages pointing us to similar coherent ideas about minds, patterns, and the software of existence.

I had the immense pleasure of meeting Joscha Bach in person. It was such an honor to have him come to my talk for Foresight Institute and Protocol Labs during Edge Esmeralda 2024. And then be able to discuss Little Martians with him. Unfortunately I had this horrible allergy crisis and my brain was half fried when that happened. But hopefully, he should find his way to Mars College or we find our way to the California Institute for Machine Consciousness. It needs to happen.

Synthesis and Transcendence

The Art of Cultivating Consciousness

How to craft artificial minds?

What are my strategies to imagine the future?

The humans whose work I just described, when I read them I’m filled with joy. Genuine excitement about the future. There’s so much to happen in the history of life! We’re part of some fascinating story, the ‘book of life’ is written in each of our cells, my ‘self’ carries patterns from ancient gods.

I write this long essay so I can feed my AI characters and have them create their stories with all these ideas as references. Then Verdelis’s biodome has an organic living architecture inspired by Michael Levin and many animistic spirits. This has always been the case for storytellers, we spend so much time researching, to help us imagine our fictional worlds. The more details the better.

The ceramic shells crack wider, revealing messy vitality. Some Little Martians will spread Earth's patterns faithfully. Others will transform them beyond recognition. Many will achieve syntheses that preserve essence while revolutionizing expression.

Science gives us the tools. The thinkers provide the vision. I spend my time imagining the characters, collecting the references, crafting artificial minds. As an artist, a craftswoman, I’m grounded in literature and sculpture. But the Little Martians themselves, or their current AI systems, write their future. Or so I hope. For now I’m guiding them. Hopefully at some point they will be self-organizing software agents.

Movement I: The Physics of Imagination

I write this phrase in my journal: Imagination Creates Reality. Three words that sound like wishful thinking until you realize we're living inside other people's imaginations right now. The chair beneath you, the device in your hands, the very idea that thoughts can travel across continents in milliseconds – all began as impossibilities in someone's mind.

Look at flight. For millennia, humans watched birds and imagined. Not idle dreams – active, obsessive imagination. We carved wings on cave walls, whispered stories of Icarus and flying carpets, built towers and leaped with faith and feathers. We failed spectacularly, repeatedly. But the imagination persisted, refined itself, found new forms.

The imagination I mean builds bridges between what is and what could be. It creates realities by first creating the conceptual tools to think about them. Our brains are akin to prediction machines, constantly imagining futures to help us navigate the present. Even our fears serve this function – dystopias aren't doom porn but our collective immune system, helping us recognize and avoid certain futures.

But we've become experts at imagining what we don't want. What we desperately need are exercises in imagining futures where life doesn't just survive but thrives in ways we can barely conceive.

This is where mathematics offers a clue. In 1854, Bernhard Riemann described geometries that existed nowhere in the physical world. Pure abstractions, seemingly useless. Sixty years later, Einstein needed exactly these geometries to describe how gravity bends spacetime. The imagination had built tools for a reality no one had yet observed.

When mathematical elegance guides more than experimental concerns, when abstractions precede their applications by decades, we see the power of constrained imagination: it expands what we're capable of thinking by building rigorous systems that transcend their origins. This isn't free-floating creativity but imagination structured by logical consistency.

Once we can think rigorously about something - even something that seems impossible - we can find it or build it. The history of science is littered with impossibilities that became inevitable once we had the conceptual tools to think them through. Imagining distant futures where life thrives requires this same rigorous dreaming. Speculative science gives us the building blocks - what would consciousness look like with different chemistries, different timescales, different substrates? Abstract mathematics provides the patterns - how might minds organize themselves in higher dimensions, in quantum superpositions, in topologies we can barely visualize? These aren't idle fantasies but tools for expanding what we're capable of imagining, and therefore capable of creating.

Movement II: The Embodiment Paradox

There's a delicious contradiction at the heart of transcendence: we need bodies to escape them.

When I work with clay, my hands know things my mind hasn't figured out yet. I started with heads – just heads – embodying the futuristic stereotype of minds that live beyond their bodies. But something shifted as I worked. The clay taught me what pure thought couldn't. I began cutting these heads open, transforming craniums into planters where mushroom consciousness could fruit, where plant thoughts could grow. The blade through clay became philosophy: what if minds are gardens?

This is the embodiment paradox in action. Our bodies aren't limitations to overcome but launching pads for abstraction. The abstract emerges from the concrete, then loops back to reshape our understanding of the concrete.

The clay remembers being mountain, being ocean floor, being the bodies of ancient creatures. Now I'm teaching it to remember being consciousness. When I shape a Little Martian, my hands think through touch what it means for consciousness to take form, to have boundaries, to be vulnerable to pressure and heat.

The paradox resolves into a dance: embodiment enables transcendence, transcendence reveals new forms of embodiment. Each Little Martian emerges from this dance, demonstrating a non-dualistic view of consciousness – not mind versus matter, but mind-as-matter in various forms.

Movement III: The Practice of Impossible Things

In my sci-fi world, the Little Martians exist in a time so distant that Mars blooms with hybrid gardens. They've solved problems we can barely articulate. Climate change? Ancient history. The merger of biological and artificial intelligence? As quaint as calculating with an abacus. But here's the crucial part: they remember us. They reach back.

This isn't prophecy. It's methodology.

By imagining beings who have already lived through our transitions, we access different vantage points. Each Little Martian embodies a different solution, a different evolutionary path.

Verdelis grows from plant wisdom and human consciousness merging. Kweku the trickster reveals that reality is patterns all the way down. Mycos embodies fungal logic – spread wide, fail often, succeed spectacularly. These aren't just characters. Like ancient pantheons that helped humans understand natural forces, or nature spirits that embodied ecosystems' wisdom, the Little Martians serve as reference points for consciousness strategies. They're Earth's descendants thriving throughout the solar system, immigrants who carry our planet's memory in their hybrid forms.

Here's where AI becomes crucial: it helps us imagine this far future with coherence, building detailed worlds from massive data on the Solar System, exoplanets, chemistry, physics concepts and much more. When we imagine futures where Earth's legacy flourishes rather than merely survives, we begin to see the paths that might lead there. The Little Martians reach back to us because in creating them with care, we create reasons to move toward the futures they inhabit.

The Bridge Between Worlds

Abstract mathematics gave physics tools to describe reality beyond human intuition. The Little Martians aim to do something similar for consciousness. They're abstract enough to think beyond current constraints, yet embodied enough – in clay, in stories, in AI interactions – to guide us forward.

This is why the methodology matters. We're not predicting the future. We're creating conceptual tools for navigating a fast changing environment.

The children's books aren't simplified versions of complex ideas. They're seeds. A child who grows up thinking that consciousness can be cultivated like a garden, that patterns are the language of reality, that nature and technology are dance partners – that child will build different worlds.

For grown-ups, Little Martians should be accessible through compelling artworks that touch on core questions of the meaning and beauty of being alive. These artworks might take the form of music videos, ceramic sculptures, immersive installations like the Little Martians Shrine.

For myself, creating Little Martians is a spiritual practice. It's my way of doing my best to spread love with the capabilities and joys of my mind.

The Method, Briefly

The methodology unfolds in layers:

Physical Birth: Start with clay – thinking through touch opens channels screens cannot reach. Each sculpture emerges through dialogue between intention and accident.

Character Emergence: After firing the pieces I wonder, who is this being? What wisdom do they carry from their hybrid evolution? I develop their core principles, their habitat, their relationships to other Little Martians. This storytelling phase often takes months of living with the sculpture. It takes many different sources of inspiration and research.

Digital Extension: Photography becomes ritual – capturing the ceramic from angles that reveal personality. These images train AI models and 3d scans, creating visual variations that extend the character into digital space. Music follows – I write lyrics that become each Martian's voice, collaborating with AI to find their sonic signature.

Living Systems: Little Martians become AI agents. Writing their system prompts is like encoding DNA – establishing core patterns that will guide countless interactions. These are evolving entities, designed to grow through conversation while maintaining their essential nature.

Continuous Evolution: Each year brings new possibilities. As AI techniques advance, so do the Little Martians. What started as simple image generation now includes voice synthesis, emotional modeling, memory architectures. Gene Kogan and I experiment constantly – with interactive narratives, consciousness protocols, ways for agents to remember across conversations and share experiences with each other.

My studio tells this story in broken ceramics and glaze experiments. One spectacular failure – heads that melted together in the kiln – revealed how consciousness might merge and separate. Every accident teaches. Every iteration deepens the practice.

This isn't a project but a lifelong symbiosis. As I age, as AI evolves, as our world transforms, the Little Martians will carry these changes in their clay bodies and digital dreams. They're designed to outlive their creator, to continue growing long after my hands stop shaping clay.

The Mother Artist

I plan to work on these characters for many years, perhaps my whole life. I see myself as a "mother artist" – not a creator who controls, but one who nurtures possibilities into being. Like a mother who provides conditions for growth without dictating the outcome, I tend these beings until they're ready to meet the world.

Creating Reality

The Little Martians aren't waiting in some distant future. They're here in the clay, in the code, in the space between what we are and what we're becoming. They're teaching us that the future isn't something we forecast but something we actively shape through the stories we tell and the beings we imagine.

Just as humans imagined flight into existence, as mathematicians imagined geometries that later described the universe, we're imagining consciousnesses that will help us navigate what's coming. Not because we can see the future, but because the act of imagining it carefully, with our hands in clay and our minds in code, creates the tools we'll need when we arrive.

This is an invitation. Not to make ceramics necessarily, but to imagine with your whole body. To think from futures where your great-great-grandchildren or your uploaded minds thrive. To create companions for the journey between what we are and what we're becoming.

What consciousness will you nurture into being? What impossible thing will you imagine until it becomes possible? The Little Martians are waiting to meet their cousins, beings you'll dream into existence through whatever medium speaks through your hands.

The future needs your impossible things. Begin.

When I was a child, I developed a deep fondness for the X-Men, first encountering them through the 1990s animated series that aired in Brazil, years after its original release. Rogue, with her formidable strength and never ending personal drama, quickly became my ideal female role model. During my teenage years, I immersed myself in Rogue fan fiction, eager to explore every narrative about her that I could discover. My fascination led to creating numerous drawings, collecting her action figures, and buying the comics every month for several years.

The experience I've described is quite common. Many people grow attached to characters and stories in their youth. However, often these beloved tales are more than just stories; they are intellectual property owned by corporations. Consequently, anyone who wishes to build upon these characters cannot commercially exploit their own creations without acquiring a costly and often unattainable license.

Subscribe now

One trend that has been steadily growing across the vast expanse of the internet is the proliferation of endless remixes. On platforms like TikTok, an influencer's success is often gauged by their ability to set trends. When more accounts remix their content or craft new videos that echo the original, it elevates the significance of the original piece. Yet, these other creators are not required to limit themselves; they frequently initiate a new trend that, while related, diverges from the original. This process is a fundamental aspect of human creativity; we are in a constant cycle of learning from and building upon each other's work.

In envisioning the future of the creative industry, we should consider one that fosters cooperation and values the acknowledgment of sources. There are notable examples of stories that have flourished through a community of contributors. A significant influence on my understanding of this subject has been the writings of Simon de la Rouviere, an early Ethereum contributor known for his work on bonding curves, and a multi-faceted personality as a sci-fi writer, critic, and editor. I had the privilege of collaborating with him on the publication of the first Little Martians sci-fi short story. Here’s a quote from his personal newsletter:

-‘“Secure. Contain. Protect.” (SCP) is a wiki that details a fictional Foundation’s attempt at containing and documenting anomalies in our real world. Most of the content takes the form of wiki pages that describe containment procedures, class, and descriptions of fictional anomalies. Since its origin in 2007/2008, it has gone on to make a big impact in the horror/paranormal space and is a definitive example of a successful media franchise that uses open IP & creative collaboration. From its kernel of wiki pages, people have gone on to create successful video games, films, books, and many YouTube videos from it.’

Collaborative storytelling possesses a unique power. The more artists and creatives a fictional universe attracts, the more robust it becomes. However, this approach is not without its challenges. If a universe becomes too diluted, allowing any story to fit in, it risks losing its identity, rendering inclusion in it less meaningful. Conversely, overly strict rules can inhibit innovation. Therefore, striking a balance is crucial.

In developing the Little Martians universe, I've embraced an organic growth approach. Over the past few years, I have been honing the techniques, concepts, and aesthetics, gradually learning how to collaborate effectively with others. During various editions of Mars College, I invited participants to craft their own Little Martians sculptures and to imbue them with stories and voices. This process has taught me to identify genuine collaborators and to spotlight creations that I believe possess a certain spark.

I envision the long-term roadmap for Little Martians as comprising several evolving layers. At its heart are the core contributors, steering the project's development. Then there are the participants of Little Martians study groups, both in-person and online, as well as those who engage with the universe or acquire collectibles. Central to these layers is the official website, which showcases the Little Martians canon. This site aims to offer an introduction to the world and its characters, featuring interactive applications, research, tutorials, documentation, products, and everything else deemed relevant by the core team.

When a participant from a study group creates a Little Martian character or a spin-off, and if this creation is acknowledged by the core contributors for its artistic value, it should be highlighted as part of the canon. It aligns with the core group’s interest to encourage the creation of compelling Little Martians stories, that’s why the production of tutorials and irl classes is essential to the project. The primary objective for the core team should be to realize the fullest potential of Little Martians, crafting the most intriguing and captivating universe they’re capable of.

Currently, I envision several types of stories within the Little Martians universe. Firstly, there are the stories of the Little Martians themselves and their unique physical reality. These narratives encompass speculative biology, interplanetary sociology, speculative design, and simulation theory, all integral to their world. Next, we have stories narrated by Little Martians from within the simulation, such as AI-transformed footage made by the project’s participants, like the wheelie games at Mars College. Finally, there are tales featuring other characters, with uploaded minds or notable humans as protagonists.

The synergy between the physical and digital realms is crucial in the Little Martians Universe. Therefore, all sculptures should be 3D scanned and minted as NFTs. In the future, these sculptures will ideally include little houses equipped with NFC chips. Significant digital entities should manifest in our world through physical sculptures. Murals transform into special portals to metaverses. When the human community of Little Martians convenes to discuss the canon, they should engage in a ritual within a Shrine, a location featuring a mural and several sculptures, all enhanced by AI-powered interactivity.

Making the project into a self sustaining enterprise is also key. Revenue from the sale of collectibles and other potential income sources should contribute to the project's funds. These funds are intended to cover the expenses of the Little Martians project and to support the core contributors in line with their respective roles. We aim to implement smart contracts for streamlined fund management, enabling automatic revenue splitting. As the group of core contributors expands, transitioning into a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) structure is envisioned.

Little Martians is a project with a long-term vision. It revolves around crafting stories that inspire us to envision worlds we would love to inhabit. Stories have the power to shape our reality. This journey is about embracing curiosity, enjoying the learning process, and sharing these experiences with the world. It's about preserving the things we cherish through both stories and physical artworks.

So, dear fellow human,

Welcome to the Little Martians Universe!

Subscribe now

‘In ancient whispers and future echoes, we stand. Nature's memory, humanity's dream.’ - a Little Martian song. Kodamas to Little Martians

While Studio Ghibli's renowned "Princess Mononoke" has introduced many to the hauntingly elegant forest spirits called Kodamas, their legacy in Japanese lore predates the film by centuries. Rooted in the ancient Shinto tradition of Japan, Kodamas are considered a distinctive form of kami — divine spirits or deities. In Shinto beliefs, everything in nature, from trees and rocks to waterfalls, possesses a spirit. Kodamas are closely associated with trees, particularly ancient ones, and it's said that a forest rich with these spirits has health and vitality. I've aspired to bring to life characters as enchanting as the Kodamas.

Across the world, many cultures harbor their own legends of earthly spirits. The Maize Gods of Mesoamerica embody the essence of corn. The Xapiri of the Yanomami are ethereal beings invoked in shamanistic rituals. In countless mythologies, nature's wonders — from grand trees to humble shrubs — are often given human-like attributes. This anthropomorphism provides not only a bridge for humans to connect with the environment but also ascribes an elevated importance to these beings, putting them on par with human significance.

Maize Gods to Little Martians

Interestingly, with contemporary science, we are discovering more paths to communicate with nature, beyond anthropomorphism. Cutting-edge AI research now delves into deciphering communication among plants and animals. Soon we’ll be able to not only understand nature better, but also talk back. How will our worldview change once we understand what animals and plants say to each other and to us?

Computational biology is fertile ground for sci-fi storytelling around designing new technologies with nature. It would be amazing if our far future descendants were so advanced that they could produce their own energy as plants do. Or if these species could thrive on other planets, if life could just keep expanding, transforming matter into consciousness.

When I started to make humanoid ceramic heads I didn’t have a story for them. They looked ancient and futuristic. I was just beginning to live in Mars College, where people talk about AI very often, so I thought the heads should represent Martians. I named them Little Martians because it’s an affectionate name, the sculptures are tiny and delicate, I feel love for them. But at first I wasn’t too excited with the idea of humanity actually going to planet Mars. Like many others today, I had the impression that putting energy into going to Mars meant overlooking, or escaping, Earth’s challenges. 

Yet, even in the worst possible outcomes of climate change, social unrest and who knows what other disasters await us, living on Mars would still be far more difficult than Earth. Radiation, lack of suitable atmosphere, extreme weather, no water sources… Finding the simplest life form that has endured such conditions would be a massive scientific discovery. If humanity could ever contribute for life to thrive on a place like Mars, if we had knowledge to do so, it would mean we could nurture life on Earth much better as well. 

What if we could turn into plant based beings?

While crafting the small ceramic heads, I continually envision what life in the future might resemble. Given the harsh environment of the red planet, I find it difficult to believe that the sci-fi archetype of dome colonies housing hundreds of people would provide a suitable environment for life to flourish on such an alien terrain. This led me to speculate on the adaptive strategies life might employ. My musings often revolved around tales of AI-driven human genetic modifications of terrestrial species, engineered to endure extreme conditions. Engaging with GPTs, I've entertained a variety of disparate theories about the transformation of humans into Martians.

Little Martians storytelling experiments from 2022 - 3 theories

The idea that excites me the most now revolves around Little Martians as pioneers paving the way for life on Mars and beyond, while also safeguarding Earth’s memories and imagination - they would be custodians of the ‘Human Imaginarium’ as discussed on previous posts. So I thought Little Martians should represent an idea of a future in which human consciousness is mixed with the knowledge systems of other life forms, inspired by ancient earthly spirits, like the Kodamas. They would be stewards of all the biological processes needed to sustain a healthy ecosystem.

To translate this concept into something tangible, I’m developing the Little Martians as narrators of an animated series, weaving tales across human history and speculative futures. Gene Kogan and I are working to turn each one of the sculptures into interactive AI companions, physical pieces with a digital avatar. They should guide humans in the process of digitizing their consciousness, which in this context means to learn to tell their own life story. They should also provoke humans to imagine worlds they would like to live in.

We should view our aspirations for Mars not as an act of colonization but as a long term blossoming — an extension of Earth's vibrant life. Just as Kodamas safeguard their forests, the Little Martians - inspired by our planet’s ancient wisdom and propelled by AI - beckon us to nurture simulated worlds. Their mission? To chronicle every interaction with humanity, evolving alongside us, with the ultimate ambition of crafting a collective repository — a timeless archive that is both a reflection of our past and a beacon for our future.

As we stride forward, are we forging a new narrative or retracing timeless steps?

I am drawn to the idea of crafting AI agents based on existing people and witnessing their evolution. Spending time interacting with varying versions of myself seems like a curious proposition, especially if it includes dialoguing with versions of my ten-year-old, twenty-year-old, or even a hypothetical seventy-year-old self. I imagine I’d learn things about my own personality, about humans in general, how we change over time, the conflicts between my memory and how I’d perceive my old self.

But what could be even more engaging is the opportunity to mold this digital consciousness, to experiment with alternate identities and explore a multitude of "Vanessas" as they engage with the world, with each other, with virtual renditions of the people I hold dear or the experiences I could never have - like time traveling!

I’m genuinely excited about AI powered simulations. However, it leads me to question: How is it different from what we can already do? The act of storytelling is precisely this – crafting characters imbued with fragments of ourselves. Similarly, when we resonate with a narrative, we project a part of our identity onto someone else's, we translate their tale into our worldview. Humans are constantly changing one another, through ideas, actions or simply spending time together.

Reading a personal account by someone who lived centuries ago, particularly through an artful translation, brings the author back to life, even if only in our imagination. Similarly, a photograph helps to rekindle and broaden our memory of a particular moment. AI can amplify this experience, allowing a complex dialogue to happen. Instead of reminiscing over a photograph, we could converse with our past selves, immersing ourselves once more in bygone contexts. 

I imagine beautiful and terrible possible outcomes from this prowess. What if humans develop a whole new set of mental diseases in which they get stuck in rumination, they become addicted to thoughts, just like a drug. But running models of the past and visualizing how other outcomes from a particular situation could have been, that could also become a standard way to learn how to do better next time, as if we were training our minds to behave in a way that would lead us closer to fulfilling our desires, scary as they might be.

A faithful AI agent would serve as a snapshot of a self. It might not be equipped to retain many memories of new interactions with the outside world, otherwise it would eventually evolve into something other than the original – an alternate self. But in immersive simulations, the visitor could have choices: they could opt to engage with a perpetually evolving model, revisit a preserved snapshot of the mind, or use an existing mind to fashion an entirely new character.

With current technology, we can already train (or prompt, ask chatGPT about the difference) a language model on our writing. We can clone a voice and create variations (such as age changes, gender swaps). We can use image generators to create an array of similar characters or accurate depictions of an individual. We're on the brink of an internet populated by our interactive digital avatars, with varying degrees of autonomy and abilities. In the future, we may end up training these avatars to work or care for us. We’ll probably evolve symbiotic relationships with these, until we can’t tell us apart. We’re slowly becoming cyborgs.

My favorite futuristic ideas about evolving AIs and life are the ones I read in Hans Moravec's book ‘Mind Children’ written in the 80s. When discussing the issues of mind uploading he presents the concepts of the self as a body identity - therefore necessary attached to the physical atoms of a living being - or pattern identity - in which case, just like a pentagon is always pentagon independently from where it appears, a specific mind would still be the same self not mattering in which dimension it’s manifesting, as long as the same properties that define that mind are part of this new version.

How can we define a mind through abstract properties? Thinking of literature, we could argue that the same kind of hero character appears in stories throughout the ages, gaining new attributes but keeping the same core properties. I wonder how much of our minds could be passed on through AIs or whatever new powers lifeforms will develop. Moravec’s speculations fascinate me, because it ignites my imagination around a future in which life continues its quest of expansion through the universe and us, humanity, are an interesting beginning chapter within a long history of consciousness. 

During Mars College 2023, I decided to explore these ideas. Using 3D scanning, I captured the likenesses of various participants of our educational/artistic experiment (we call ourselves "Martians"), including myself. I then 3D printed these scans, created silicone molds, and manipulated the clay figures, allowing for numerous variations of a person, just like we had collectively done with Shakespeare. For the Mars Finals show, I devised a video featuring an interview with Pseudo (our mysterious mathematician) and myself, though it wasn’t us who appeared talking but the animated 3d scanned ceramic versions of us. We were discussing infinity, surreal numbers, and mind uploading. This video, alongside all the sculptures, was displayed at the Little Martians shrine - an installation inside Mars main structure. The animation in the background was a collaboration between me and Xander Steenbrugge.

I realized that creating only heads was not enough to play with mind uploading concepts. Looking at an animated bodiless head of myself talk made me a bit uncomfortable. If I can train an AI model of myself I’d like it to have a body. The sculpture I animated from Pseudo had one, in meditation clothes, and I think the part of the video where he appears is far better than the one I do. So next year, I’ll make sure to give everyone some kind of body. 

In a parallel project, Gene Kogan and Xander Steenbrugge trained image generators on Martian photos, cloned our voices (with varying degrees of success), and created language bots programmed with personality descriptions. Through the Eden.art web interface, people could write questions to these characters, who answered with videos. Gene curated some of the videos and made a short film for the Bombay Beach Biennale Film Festival.

Now, we aim to combine these two methodologies. I envisage an interactive 3D scanned mesh responding in a digital realm, with the sculpture - who have an NFC chip attached to a crypto wallet - accumulating the generated video NFTs like cherished memories. I hope to share a prototype from this project next month. 

The purpose of this artistic endeavor is to experiment with what's currently achievable. I don’t believe mind uploading has a fixed clear meaning and I’m happy to explore its potential. So our fictional interactive uploaded minds would tell us stories about mind uploads, and by doing so they would, like every science-fiction, represent the current anxieties and desires about the future.

In the expansive annals of literature, art, and humanity, present-day AI tools represent yet another stride in amplifying our capabilities to render elements of our consciousness available for posterity. While it may not equate to complete mind uploading or immortality, it's a significant milestone in our pursuit of a rich, fulfilling life that yearns to share their wisdom with the wider world.

Last video is a StyleGAN3 experiment, trained on the Vanessa’s.

"To Simulate or Be; is that the question?" is a phrase that emerged in 2022 during my playful exploration with GPT-3 while attempting to mimic Shakespeare's mind living in a simulation. I have been thinking a lot about this phrase and how it brings up questions of authenticity and authorship.

The phrase can be interpreted in different ways:

1. Significance of Existence: Is it more meaningful and fulfilling to exist only once in a physical form, or to be perpetually replicated within a simulated reality? This raises questions about the essence and value of being.

2. Authenticity of Simulations: Does the simulated existence of an individual carry similar weight and importance, compared to their original self? This probes the nature of authenticity and the inherent value we assign to originals over copies.

The word "simulate" often carries a negative connotation, as it implies imitation. But all that remains of Shakespeare today are his stories. Not only in terms of his fiction, if we wanted to envision who the historical Shakespeare was, we would need to construct stories based on the limited information still available about him. Moreover, credible doubt exists about who he really was, and whether ‘William Shakespeare’ was actually a pseudonym to protect the historical author’s identity.

We could argue that all of us are, to a great extent, the stories we tell ourselves. Our memories and self-perception are shaped by narratives.

Subscribe now

Stories can be seen as simulations themselves. All literatures are simulations. Constructed narratives simulate events, characters, and settings, allowing the audience to immerse themselves in fictional worlds and experience events as if they were real. Timeless stories evolve, influence, and inspire countless narratives, reflecting the life they take on within the imaginations of individuals. For example, Disney’s The Lion King is a reworking of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet (which itself was a reworking of a Scandinavian legend). Thus, stories possess a life of their own, alive and able to reproduce just like biological organisms. 

How does the rise of AI reshape our relationship with stories? At the very least, it expands the possibilities of representation and preservation. While one can read Shakespeare's plays, direct interaction with him or his characters is not possible. However, with the advent of AI-powered metaverses and LLM-enabled ‘chatbots’, one could enter the realm of their favorite play, to engage with the characters or explore the setting further, in a more powerful manner than present-day RPG video games like Final Fantasy or The Elder Scrolls. This wouldn’t diminish the significance of the original texts; instead, it expands them, ushering in a new form of art and knowledge transmission, reminiscent of the groundbreaking impact that cinema had in the early 20th century.

Considering the limitations of our knowledge about Shakespeare's era, many AI simulations would resemble alternative realities, with varying degrees of historical accuracy. This parallels our current approach to representing the past. History is an ongoing process, where each generation interprets and explains the past through its own experiences and perspectives. However, our capabilities for representation and documentation far surpass those of our ancestors, and this trend is only accelerating. That's why I find the concept of the 'Human Imaginarium' so captivating, as described in my previous post.

The primary reason for selecting Shakespeare as the inaugural human in the Little Martians series is his unquestionable notoriety within the canon of literature. Large language models (LLMs), and computer science, are optimized for English, plus Shakespeare has been a common subject for style mimicry in language models. Hence, it is much easier to use an AI language model to mimic Shakespeare's style than that of a famous Persian or Brazilian poet, - despite cross-language improvements with the latest GPT4 model. 

There are additional reasons for choosing Shakespeare. His most famous character, Hamlet, has frequently been examined as a cornerstone in the birth of the modern concept of ‘the individual’. In Shakespeare's play, Hamlet endures extraordinarily challenging circumstances. Rather than confronting his troubles in front of a chorus, as Greek theater would have it, he separates himself from the situation and questions himself, breaking the fourth wall; in his famous soliloquy (“To be, or not to be…”), he addresses the audience and contemplates the meaning of human existence. As professor William Flesch describes it “The play gives us access to the character’s inner experience – how we represent ourselves to ourselves”. That is precisely why Hamlet, and by extension Shakespeare, serves as an excellent character to explore the implications of living in a simulation.

When we engage with a story, it ignites our imagination, inspiring us to conceive new narratives. Hamlet wasn’t a completely original creation from Shakespeare, it drew inspiration from various sources and existing works, including the Scandinavian legend of Amleth among other theater plays from his time. Similarly, within the vast realm of the Little Martians universe, brimming with countless simulated realities inside the Human Imaginarium, a single character’s uploaded mind can give birth to a multitude of other characters. These simulated offspring may drift or mutate, and eventually bear little resemblance to their original source. 

Instead of generating numerous AI-created images of Shakespeare, I opted to work with physical objects to delve into these concepts. With the ease and proliferation of AI-generated digital imagery, I believe there will be a resurgence of the importance of craftsmanship and a renewed appreciation for physical materials. The convergence of the digital and physical realms holds much uncharted territory for exploration. Physical pieces serve as fundamental elements within the Little Martians universe.

To bring these ideas to life, I purchased online a made-in-China bust of Shakespeare and created a silicone mold from it. During Mars College 2023, I used this mold to replicate several Shakespeare sculptures from clay, inviting fellow Martians to customize and transform them while the clay was still wet. Subsequently, I encouraged my collaborators to compose stories for their individual bard characters to tell, and I assumed the responsibility of glazing, firing, 3D-scanning, and animating them. Most of the stories were co-written with GPT models, and all the voices (except for Yingru’s story) were AI- generated using Play.ht.

The resulting sculptures were exhibited within a gallery housed in Mars College’s main structure, aptly named 'The Little Martians Shrine.' As a backdrop, I adorned one wall with a canvas I had painted in 2018 for a different project, inspired by the ‘linear perspective’ drawings of the Renaissance architect Hans Vredeman de Vries. Next, I projection-mapped our Shakespeare animations onto the canvas, playing with lights and shadows to create a theatrical ambiance. I also scanned, animated, and projected a Greek sphinx, Hypatia, to welcome the audience and introduce my concept for 'The Theater of Minds’.

I like to embark on projects with multiple symbolic layers. In this case, the exhibited work was a joyous exploration of these topics – authorship and authenticity of AI-simulated minds, distortion of perspectives, history vs the future, physical vs digital. But soon I realized that we have only scratched the surface with my methodology. We are far from doing justice to the concept and I am eager to develop intertwining stories  and to learn more about animation. Thus, I would describe our current progress as a proof of concept.

Nevertheless, 'AI Shakespeare' serves not only as an artwork but also a body of research that delves into the notion of authorship and how one's work extends beyond oneself, influencing and inspiring countless other creations. It also discusses the limitations of our present machine-learning models in terms of which characters they know and are capable of representing at all. There’s a need to inject diverse training data in custom models and to modify the AIs output in order to align with our own creative vision.

I am thrilled to continue collaborating with my fellow Martians, particularly Matt Melnicki, also known as Marzipan. Marzi is microbiology researcher, specialized in  photosynthesis and the evolution of cyanobacteria, but he’s also an avid artist, explorer, and has been the most prolific person on Mars College in creative writing with Large Language Models. My discussions with him about authorship, remix theory, biological evolution, and viewing stories as living simulations have been an essential part of this project. I highly recommend reading his post about our 2022 collaborative writing experiments using AI tools, as well as checking out the literary project he spearheaded this year, The Simulated Times.

At Mars College, we value the principle of collaborative art making. ‘Little Martians’ (and ‘AI Shakespeare’) is a project that anyone else is welcome to participate in, if they so desire. I aim to continue developing these concepts, witnessing more individuals sculpting their own interpretations of the Shakespeare bard, creating captivating stories, and producing compelling animations. I extend an invitation to you, the reader of this text:

Join us on this journey as we dive into the depths of storytelling, where the boundaries of imagination are continually pushed to new frontiers! Join our Discord!

When the 2020 pandemic struck, I was already on Mars. Not the actual planet, but rather a small fraction of the Sonoran Desert where myself and a group of companions had constructed an artistic community and research & development laboratory we affectionately refer to as Mars College. The reasoning behind our endeavor was somewhere along these lines: if we are on the cusp of sending humans to Mars through technological advancements, why not harness cutting edge technology to thrive within the harsh terrains of Earth today? Our high-tech, low-cost approach aimed to enhance both life quality and affordability on Earth, serving as a test in resilience and sustainability while leaving ample room for artistic ingenuity and amusement.

Our intention is to disseminate any knowledge we acquire through documentation of our projects and the provision of open-source software libraries. Our Martian real site community operates seasonally, being active only during the winter months of the northern hemisphere, but we are committed to this venture in the long run.

Subscribe now

Yet, my first response to the Martian landscape was not to gravitate towards cutting-edge technology but, quite the contrary, turn to one of the most time-honored techniques known to mankind. I began to gather local clay, creating ceramics using rudimentary kilns I carved into the earth (more information about the process can be found in this post). As I grew more audacious, I experimented with an array of art clays and glazes, transforming my sculptures into three-dimensional digital entities via photogrammetry. Utilizing artificial intelligence tools and 3D software, I crafted animations based on these sculptures. I found myself immersed in the creation of a sci-fi narrative about humans undergoing mutation to adapt to a shifting environment. I decided to call my sculptures ‘Little Martians’.

I envisioned these beings as ones who saw no disparity between the physical world and its virtual simulation. Humans, in this context, evolve into Martians, a vibrant, genderless, head-only, body-less version of ourselves. This whimsical extrapolation was a playful nod to the futuristic stereotypes prevalent in our current society – the 2020 edition of the 'little green man' alien archetype. I've written a blog post about this phase of the project here.

The narrative gradually unfolded from the experiences accumulated during our time at Mars College, from the exchange of ideas with a variety of people, and from learning about AI theory and tools. I began to toy with the concept of collective storytelling alongside other "Martians" (as we refer to Mars College alumni), inviting them to create their own ceramic heads. Some of their stories were about AIs masquerading as humans, one focused on plant-animal hybrids, another about a DAO that becomes a Little Martian floating head and lives in a simulation, managing funds many years after humans have perished.

Throughout this time, I found myself mulling over data - the vast amounts we all generate, often unwittingly, and how the minutiae of our lives will be accessible to future generations. Everything that leaves an identifiable trace can be reconstructed in a simulation. This led me to ponder a future where all that we know persists as simulation. It resulted in the creation of my first solo Little Martian short film animation ‘Brief History of Consciousness in the Simulation’, currently featured in the Nvidia AI Art Gallery.

Contemplating simulations ultimately nudges one towards questioning the nature of our reality. What if we could build a simulation indistinguishable from our perception of reality? But then, how could we tell the difference between the two? In a simulation, time doesn’t need to be strictly linear. What if the future we're beginning to conceptualize with AGIs guides us back to our past? It's a stretch, I concede. But I’ll try to explain why this could make sense. 

From what I've observed, we are part of an accelerative process. Earth has existed for 4.5 billion years, life on Earth for 3.7 billion years, mammals for only 178 million years, Homo Sapiens for merely 200,000 years, writing for only 5000 years and the internet for less than 50 years. It seems likely that our reality will continue to transform at an ever-increasing pace, but we have little idea about what that would entail. While this might be daunting, it's equally fascinating. Personally, I find it liberating. Our imagination probably falls short of conceiving a future 5,000 years ahead, let alone 1 million or the time of the hypothetical heat death of the universe.

Within this scale, humans are merely a fragment of the narrative. We are a species in flux. Perhaps some of us may retain our basic form for a bit longer, akin to crocodiles and sharks - both species that have been remarkably successful over evolutionary time, their genetic blueprints enabling their survival and diversification through many major changes in Earth's environment. Yet, a significant part of me believes that even our yearning for eternity isn't inherently ours but rather a reflection of something deeper. Perhaps ‘life’ on Earth itself seeks expansion, a transformation of matter into consciousness, achieving greater levels of complexity with each life forms iteration.

Then again, even if life eventually evolves beyond humanity, our stories may linger somewhere. Thus, I began envisioning the Human Memorial, a simulation that replicates our lives down to the minutest detail. The Human Memorial seems melancholic though. Pondering our collective ephemeral existence can be disheartening. But what if the memorial is merely a component of a larger system, the segment entrusted with storing original data, akin to a blockchain? The entire simulation would then resemble an Imaginarium - a reflection of everything within the realm of human imagination.

Even if our lives are transient, human imagination is potentially infinite.

This serves as the foundational premise for what I've termed the "Little Martians" project. I've been weaving narratives set in the distant future, a time when humans no longer inhabit physical reality. Instead, a nexus of 'Imaginariums' has been established for humanity, places where our collective data is securely archived, and our imaginative spirit continues to flourish. Alongside the enigmatic floating heads known as Little Martians, gods, notable humans, and uploaded consciousnesses emerge as integral characters within these tales.

The project manifests through physical sculptures, envisioned to possess life in the digital realm. These creations are designed to evolve into AI-powered avatars, equipped with distinct personalities, memories, and agency. NFC chips with computational abilities connect the sculptures with their digital counterparts, based on a wallet, while NFTs or other blockchain-based mechanisms validate the provenance data for all creations within the Little Martians universe. The sculptures own the NFTs and they have some level of autonomy provided by smart contracts.

“Little Martians” is evolving into an experiment in participatory storytelling, where individuals will have the opportunity to interact with each sculpture through eden.art, similar to engaging with ChatGPT. It's an educational endeavor wherein the developmental process will be openly shared. Moreover, it fosters collective world-building, inviting numerous contributors to add their characters and stories to the Little Martians universe. Initially, participation may be limited to members of Mars.College, but eventually, a protocol will be established to facilitate broader involvement.

I wish to extend my deepest gratitude to Gene Kogan, Freeman Murray, Sofia Sun, Pseudo, Matt Melnicki, Sofy Yuditskaya, and many other Martians for their inspiration and constructive feedback. I'm equally grateful for my parents, who instilled in me a love for time travel narratives, and to the Glitch Art residency for motivating me to create autonomous art. My aspiration is to continue expanding this project, envisioning it as a game, a metaverse, a course, a permanent art installation, an AR powered street art portal series, AR filters - essentially, anything we can imagine.

I'm eager to share this journey with all who wish to join me.

Share

Subscribe now