Little Martians: From Desert Clay to Generative Agents

Little Martians is a trans-media experiment in which physical ceramic sculptures become synthetic artists. Each character begins as a clay head, is fired in a kiln, photographed, and distilled into a LoRA that conditions generative AI systems. The pipeline bridges ancient craft and modern AI, rooting autonomous agents in material culture while enabling them to generate unlimited narrative, image and sound.

• Local Sonoran clay, collected and filtered, hand-sculpted into small heads, then bisque-fired above 1000 °C. The cracking that happens when a silicone mould is pressed produces the archaeological variations that later show up in the generated images.
• Conceptual grounding: Lynn Margulis on symbiogenesis, Michael Levin on bioelectric pattern memory, and Harold Cohen’s AARON as proof that creativity can come out of explicit rules and decades of iteration; with von Neumann, Karl Sims, Jeremy England, Moravec and McCorduck.
• The appendix sets out the lightweight geometric consciousness prompt generator that seeds the daily films, so that they do not all come out the same.

Read the paper (PDF) ·The poster (PDF) ·On OpenReview ·The project: verdelis.world ·Companion essay on Substack