VIA CRUSIS, LAUDATE DEUM essay based on Pope Francis 04/10/2023 exhortation The origin of life on Earth is a mystery. It may be found in the divine, it may be found in the primordial soup of early oceans and, it may be found in the vast void of space. In any case, we are under […]

On the Midjourney interface, the prompt is “/imagine” If we ask machines to “imagine” for us, why create?  Technology has always been part of creation. Whether on mosaics or drawings we see both the touch of technologies and that of the creator. The problem with pure text to image tools is that the resulting image […]

Humanity has undergone several revolutions from the wheel to the smartphone. I have experienced the profound impacts of the latter ones. These past two decades, we have tracked the convergence of machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and explainable AI, into an artificial intelligence that is poised to change the next chapter […]

Roland Barthes  How does meaning come to image? Where does meaning end? And if it ends, what is beyond? ••  The degree zero of the image is the infinite degree of the real and the first degree of the gaze. It can take many forms, one being optical illusion when it allows visual artifice to […]

With the rise of empires war has evolved both toward strategy and toward an art form combining numbers and decorum to produce a “theatre of war” where one can be visually stunned by the power of armours, sounds, lights, smoke and movements. The armies then blur humans, landscape and atmosphere into a temporal drama that […]

Every single human calls for many chairs. Since it relates body, space and work station, the office chair is perhaps the most important component of the production unit. Through ergonomic efficiency it secures the longevity of our work lifetime, and it symbolizes the power of the designer station, as it is in symbiosis with the […]

A video collage of self portraits by visual artists referred to in my projects or classes. Partial list: Anish Kapoor, Anselm Kiefer, Artemisia, Banksy, Basquiat, Bernini, Botticelli, Bruce Nauman, Caravaggio, Christo, Courbet, Da Vinci, Dalí, De Chirico, Delacroix, Diego Rivera, Dubuffet, Dürer, Ed Ruscha, El Greco, Francis Bacon, Frida Kahlo, Géricault, Gilbert & George, Goya, […]

Bruno Latour:  …there is a disconnect between the science and the size of the threat that people mention about nature, the planet and the climate, and the emotion that this triggers. So we are supposed to be extremely frightened people, but despite that we appear to sleep pretty well. ••. Weather reports are one of […]

New York Times: For a planet to be habitable, it can’t be too hot or too cold. ••  Exoplanets are like organisms in a digital universe, they are new universal devices and icons. They match a reality that appears to us in a state of nuclear velocity, at a time when our own man-made digital world […]

••  Celestial gaze Fridtjof Nansen  The sky is like an enormous cupola, blue at the zenith, shading down into green, and then into lilac and violet at the edges. ••  The dome designates a hemispherical vault with a semicircular and elliptical profile. It is an architectural typology charged with resonance. The Earth is dotted by […]

Mark petrakis:   In movies there are explosions after explosions. They stun you into submission. There is no escape from adrenaline. And the end is often a series of Explosions as if the movie was exploding itself as a grand finale. In the narrative of modernity, they are spectacular expressions of progress. They are the symbolic […]

Donald Trump:   Nobody builds walls better than me, believe me—and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.  Ancient traces imply that drawing was the first form of human expression. Dance, music, sounds, and environmental […]

William Gibson Was it Laurie Anderson who said that VR would never look real until they learned how to put some dirt in it?  When on Twitter Trump quotes Mussolini via @ilduce2016  “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” he is merely feeding a delirious ongoing […]

Airplanes have lost their mystique and been reduced to mass transportation, they throw each traveler through the grinding gears of security gates, hence pushing us through the dramaturgy of unrealistic tragedies in which we would be either on a suicide mission or aiming for martyrdom. And yet the airplane, whether as bomber or passenger jet, […]