Three things happened to me at the same time: the pandemic locked us all down, AI burst into everyday life, and in the spring of 2021, I rode 1,600 kilometers by bicycle, alone, through four countries. It was a survival decision, not a project or a protest. It was the only way to fill my lungs again, without panic.
The journey was also an internal one. Every night I slept alone in different forests, with only distance and silence for company. The Monas and Tent Visions series have their origin in those nights in the forest. This series is the internal record: what happened to me when the interruption was total.
The procedure mirrors this condition. I stopped the iterative process of an early AI portrait app before it could finish the portrait. I then translated each halted state by hand, in ink: my gesture entered exactly where I forced the algorithm to abort its fetus-form. It is an anti-morphosis, a process frozen before reaching its destination. I neither fully transformed nor reinvented myself, yet I am not the same either: linear autobiography breaks halfway, and it is halfway where I feel most firmly planted.
CS: MOTHER CELLS, MADE TO FEED THE APP
CS: POST-COVID #28
Note: The technological mediation did not begin with the app, but with photography. Over time, I could predict, to some extent, how the app (PortraitAI) would interpret my photos, so I began to manipulate found objects that could serve as its base. In other words, the app influenced the way I photographed, and so my drawings practically began the moment I took the photo. From the start, the app was one more tool, like the objects themselves, the camera, the paper, and the ink: together they formed a non-hierarchical field. After finishing the series, I kept playing with the app while waiting somewhere: I photographed whatever was in front of me to challenge it to find faces, until I discovered its "upgrade".
And that upgrade came in 2026. The process resembles the old one, but it is interrupted arbitrarily, and when the app finds no "face" (although I see a "future face" in my photos, my "mother cells"), it spits out a generic face onto the "arrested metamorphosis". My procedure anticipated something the company would later build into the app, whether for ethical, market-oriented, or financial reasons: abruptly cutting a metamorphosis, as I did. What it added on its own was replacing the monocultural, Eurocentric image the app used to arrive at with an out-of-context one.
Everything my series left behind (the photos, the interrupted app sequences, and the drawings themselves) became the only testimony of how that version of the app worked as a whole: its steps still survive, buried under the new version, but not its destination. I do not use the word "fossil" lightly: in paleontology, body fossils are the remains of an organism's body; trace fossils are traces of its activity; and molds and casts preserve its form in another material once the body is gone.
