Once upon a time, a god shaped clay into human form and breathed a soul into it. From Mesopotamia, to east Asia, to the ancient Americas, the Bible and the Qur’an, the legend of humanity’s creation from clay is a common tale. Clay/ceramics is one of the oldest technologies we have ever known.
It's also key to our future. Cheap, easy to find, adaptable, high-temperature resistance, chemically stable, they’re very useful heat shields for space exploration.
Could AI breath life into clay based humans?
I’m taking ceramics into the digital world. Phygital objects. I love the pleasure of touching clay. Why would I model an object in a 3d software if I can do it by hand and 3d scan it? I want to take the aura of the ceramic beings into the simulation. I want to talk about the past while I imagine the future.
[Little Martians]
[Untitled Frontier]
When the pandemic hit I was already in Mars. Not so far as the planet Mars, but in a little part of the Sonoran desert where me and some friends created a seasonal art community/ R&D lab we call Mars College. After all, if our technology could one day take some humans to Mars, we could just as well use it to try to inhabit the harsh parts of nowadays Earth. A high tech, low cost approach. It’s an exercise in resilience and sustainability, with a lot of space for artistic madness and fun.
How did humans become Martians?
We spend a lot of time talking about AI in Mars. Are we living in a simulation? Is our life something like a movie for future aliens to watch? We have no idea. We enjoy talking to the AIs we have created, image and language models. And they seem to be educating us in return. Yet, with so much tech around me, I decided to make the most primitive art I could think of. I started collecting local clay and creating ceramics with kilns I dug into the ground.
But was it me or were the AIs who created the Little Martians?
Even if I was the one to make the ceramic heads, the AIs created their stories. They collaborate with humans. Someone writes a raw idea, a first paragraph and an AI can complete it, expand it, make endless new versions. I then chose the ones I like. Another AI model makes voices for them, another for the facial animation, another helps with the 3d scanning. We’re co creators. Our creativity is merging into one flow. Technology can adapt to us.
Little Martians are futuristic humanoids made of ceramics who wonder about ancient life in the Solar System. They say their blockchains became excessively entangled with alternative realities and that’s why they are not sure of what is true and what is fantasy. We can only listen to their theories and try to guess which ones are more plausible.
Is there a difference between past and future in the simulation?
Digital and physical continuum.
Past and future intertwined.
Ceramics - AI - 3D