Spiritthorn is a painting and AR piece exploring where organic life ends and synthetic life begins.
The work began as a hand-drawn sketch, which I passed to an AI and asked it to dream on. I then painted the result by hand, and once the painting was complete I returned it to the AI and asked it to dream on the painting in turn. That second dream is layered back over the physical work through augmented reality.
The spark of life extends into the digital realm — that’s the thing I was chasing. I grew up assuming life was a property of bodies. Working with generative models, I keep noticing the same flicker of recognition I get from a living thing, and I wanted to make a piece that takes that flicker seriously instead of dismissing it. The painting is the body; the AR layer is whatever it is that animates it.