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We have had four new artists start in the two weeks since the last update. Here’s an overview of their AiR projects and a bit of background on each artist. Please join me in welcoming Christopher Manzione, Riccardo Arena, Andre Oshea, and Rachel Jackson to the program.
Christopher Manzione is an artist, filmmaker, and teacher known for founding the Virtual Public Art Project, which used augmented reality to produce original public artworks, and for creating the Activatar app, which hosted new media artist projects. His recent film A Universe within Itself explored AI-generated filmmaking, minimizing human intervention to showcase AI’s creative potential. Manzione's work spans sculpture, installation, virtual reality, and performance, and he has exhibited both nationally and internationally, while currently serving as an Assistant Professor in Visual Arts and Technology at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey.
Chris kicked off his first week in the program by producing a timeline overview of his proposed project (in Excel, no less!). During his residency, Chris will focus on a unique project to recreate 2001: A Space Odyssey frame by frame using various AI models. His goal is to ensure visual consistency across the generated frames, producing a cohesive reinterpretation of Kubrick's iconic film that remains both watchable and recognizable.
He has chosen to rework the film using a series of Photographic style LoRAs inspired by the Harvard History of photography from 1826-2000. He will either train or identify existing LoRAs that represent each era of photographic evolution. These resources will embody 40 distinct technological phases ranging from Nicéphore Niépce’s first photograph in 1826 to Wet Collodion, Tin Type, Silver Gelatin, Kodachrome, all the way up to the emergence of Smart Phone Photography in 2000. His outline of these phases is below, with occasional time stamps to show the pacing of how the film may be divided up.
After the film’s intermission, he will then shift to the AI gen era, dividing the remaining hour up across various visual styles that represent the breakneck pace of change in our current era. This phase correlates to the birth of AI consciousness in the film (Hal) and the monolith on the moon.
For this portion we have been discussing selecting collaborative artists from our community to contribute the LoRAs that make up these visual eras. To this end, we may run a contest on the main site to find up to 10 artists from our community whose work would be featured in the film! To me, this directorial choice would embody the democratic explosion of image creation that has happened since the proliferation of AI image gen over the past few years, echoing further the democratization of image creation that photography first introduced.
Chris will be meeting with veteran AI filmmaker and Civitai AiR alum Noah Miller soon to discuss the massive undertaking that this film will entail, and surface workflow and general approach tips for working in ComfyUI.
Riccardo Arena is an artist, researcher, and teacher whose work blends theoretical and formal research to create imaginative cultural narratives. His practice spans diverse disciplines, intertwining distant phenomena into complex stories expressed through various media. Over the years, Arena has developed long-term projects worldwide, combining myths, science, and geographies to explore universal themes. His work balances rational methodology with intuition, resulting in abstract maps and diagrams that inform his visual, verbal, and spatial creations. He is currently working on "Geranos," a project born from a research collaboration with Monte Verità, the Eranos Foundation, the Anthropological Museum of Mexico City, and the Warburg Institute - a portion of which he will be realizing in the AiR program. I highly suggest checking out his website for more documentation of his work.
We're thrilled to participate in the production of Riccardo’s new works, an artist whose creative vision blends science fiction with deeply speculative narratives. His recent pieces are a combination of speculative scientific short stories combined with supporting visual material. A point of origin in our artist-in-residence program, the two stories he is working on explore the intersection of human geography, biological mysticism, and ancient spiritual practices. His pieces feel adjacent to potential science, almost as if pulled from the pages of a frontier research journal. I’ll give short overviews of each, along with the imagery, but can’t yet release the full stories.
His near term goal is to train new LoRAs on his archival and synthetic images (photoshopped up to this point), which will enable him to output a new synthetic archive of AI-driven scientific imagery similar to the samples below.
Riccardo’s Geograficzny Okulistyczne unfolds a captivating theory that merges ophthalmology with geography. Based on the work of Polish ophthalmologist Janusz Lutoslawski, who proposed that the iris contains information about an individual's geographical origins during fetal development, Riccardo’s work extends this idea into the realm of speculative science. The iris becomes a topographical map, a personalized geography that encodes the locations shaping the individual before birth.
What hypothetical mechanism could create these ophthalmic topologies? Magnetic resonance? Some sort of subatomic light carving? If every human iris holds such a map, do we carry within our eyes a living topography of all humanity? Does this map represent another dimension—perhaps where the soul resides?
Riccardo’s second story, WALKA-ULUṞU, takes us into the deserts of Australia, where mirages are sacred visions—a geographical dreamscape that reveals itself when the land falls asleep. Riccardo imagines vast sections of dreaming land, emitting dream matter which can be interpreted and imprinted on the subconscious mind of an observer, offering a map to enter new worlds through dreams. This idea is so rich with potential; it’s like El Topo meets ethnography in an otherworldly dance.
We are thrilled to welcome Andre Oshea to the program! Andre is a digital creator known for 3D modeled animations exploring futuristic notions of spirituality and transcendence. An artist since childhood, Oshea left the traditional art school track to focus on establishing his own voice and following as a digital artist, working with clients such as Netflix, Adult Swim, and Snapchat before entering Web3 with his first mint in February 2021. Since then, he has become a leading 3D animator, with work appearing in the pages of Vogue and in sales at Christie’s. Other highlights include collaborations with the Grammys, Meta, and TIMEpieces, and recognition as part of the NFT Now 100.
Andre’s latest project in the AiR program is an intriguing exploration of perspectival anisotropy—the idea that identical events or stimuli can generate entirely different experiences depending on the observer's perspective. Using AI-generated video, Andre will input the same seed into identical prompts but run them on different hardware systems. This method will result in two distinct visual outputs, reflecting how individual perspectives are shaped not only by personal context but also by technological and environmental variables.
At the core of Andre’s project is the concept that perception is never static. Even when the input remains constant, the results are profoundly influenced by the viewer’s unique coordinates in life - geographically, politically, spiritually - and by our fluid, moment-to-moment changing status as an observer of and participant in life at large. To further engage with this theme, Andre plans to create two Instagram pages, posting the resulting videos daily in the lead-up to Art Basel. By documenting evolving audience engagements and interpretations on these two platforms, the project will make clear how identical content is experienced in remarkably different ways based on the audience's engagement and the platform's ecosystem.
This work invites us to reflect on how no two experiences of the same event are truly identical, as perception and interaction shift according to ever-changing personal, technological, and social factors. We are excited to witness Andre’s experiment unfold as he continues to push the boundaries of how we understand and interpret art through the lens of contemporary technology.
Rachel Jackson’s AiR project centers around the concept of false indexicality, using the story of Burrows Cave as an allegory for the creation of pseudo-artifacts and the malleability of historical narratives through AI. Burrows Cave, an alleged archaeological site discovered in the 1980s, was filled with artifacts that, if authentic, would have rewritten the history of Pre-Columbian contact in North America. Despite being largely debunked, these artifacts have fascinated fringe archaeologists, leaving the site and its archival material cast into a strange limbo between myth and reality.
Rachel’s work is an exploration of how AI can both enhance and distort the existing uncertainty surrounding the cave’s history. Using AI-generated images, pseudoscientific research documents, 3D-printed replicas of false artifacts, and a documentary-style film, Rachel’s work constructs new layers of fiction around the Burrows Cave narrative. These synthetic artifacts and documents, infused with an uncanny realism, raise questions about authenticity, the creation of history, and the subjective nature of truth.
Rachel’s use of AI here is particularly potent, as it mirrors how preexisting information can be twisted or exaggerated, just as AI systems assemble realities from existing data. The project is in an intermediate stage, with the film partially complete and the artifacts still in production, but the final vision is a museological exhibition at UC Riverside. This display will push the boundaries of what we perceive as genuine history, using AI as both a tool of creation and distortion.
This work taps into the tension between reality and fabrication, challenging us to consider how technology reshapes our understanding of the past. We are eager to see how Rachel’s project continues to unfold, pushing deeper into the uncanny spaces between truth and fiction.
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