Brain in a Vase
How is AI reshaping the way people think and act?
This is an improvised collage, made in ten minutes from torn magazine pages. A figure in a white coat sits chin in hand, contemplating the Earth. With AI, everyone seems to hold a superpower, each a would-be changemaker redrawing the map.
Yet his head has been swapped for a vase of flowers. When machines think so much faster than we do, an existential crisis creeps in: if everything can be simulated with data, is the human mind anything more than the brain in a vat, a million memories rearranged?
In the lower corner, a much smaller figure has a horse’s head. As entry-level jobs vanish, the people AI displaces are pushed out of frame, many of them reduced to beasts of burden. Kafka’s Gregor wakes as an insect but keeps a human mind; these workers keep their bodies while the work wears their humanity away.
How is AI reshaping the way people think and act?
A diver falls through sea and sky toward a mountain that is also an ocean—a collage on scale and belonging.
A study after Van Gogh’s 1888 seascape—short, restless strokes chasing the movement of open water.
Botanical prints, halftone dots, and old letters grow out of a mushroom form; nature spliced with print culture.
A digital reworking of Guillaumin’s fauvist valley—pushing the pinks and violets further than the original dares.
Lotus leaves and blossoms emerging from a dark pond; painted from life, greens layered wet into wet.
After Monet’s 1875 riverbank—moored boats and their broken reflections on a bright, wind-ruffled Seine.
An early study after Van Gogh—swirling cloud and cypress, the whole field caught mid-gust.