Every generation has to write its own version of history in order to understand itself, to
make its present intelligible at all. By interrogating the past, we are also wondering what
is possible in our future.
With the rise of artificial intelligence and rapid environmental collapse, I believe the pace
of change forces us to look at our past on a much wider scale than the human. We have always
been part of a process of acceleration. Earth has existed for 4.5 billion years, life on
Earth for 3.7 billion years, mammals for 200 million years, Homo Sapiens for merely 300,000
years, writing for only 5,000 years, controlled airplanes for around 100 years and the
internet for less than 60 years. Our imagination probably falls short of conceiving a future
200 years ahead, let alone 1,000 or the time of the hypothetical heat death of the universe.
Yet, long term planning is essential for the survival of our species and our biosphere. How
can we train our imagination to reach other dimensions?
Intelligence is a much broader phenomenon than the human brain. We think through our whole
bodies; the brain is a coordination endpoint. The history of life makes more sense as the
evolution of ecosystems than as a sequence of individual actors. Crises are also
opportunities for new beginnings. Despite all the current suffering and understandable fear,
I practice existential hope, meaning I believe that the long future is not merely survivable
but extraordinary. I expose myself to outstanding situations, build spaces, read what
intrigues me, imagine future beings with my hands, and then try to see the patterns.
On this page I would like to share the fruits of my current research, but also the evolution
of my thought process.
Topics
What I keep coming back to
Time-traveling
Imagining the past and the future. With a lot of speculative biology.
Representational Geometry
From linear perspective to latent spaces.
Ethnomathematics
The relationship of maths and culture. Patterns as the underlying logic of reality, and algorithmic art.
Authorship and the self
The history of artists as a social role, the concept of genius, cultural industry and alternative paths.
Cultural heritage
I want AI to amplify the value of physical craft. The more digital iterations are created, the more precious the originals become.
Symbiogenesis
Selection edits. The real jumps in the history of life happened through symbiosis.
Written before the AI image boom of 2022. It explains how generative models would upend the creator economy, and that the best artists could do was to learn as much as they could about the AI models and the possibilities they open.
I want AI to amplify the value of physical craft rather than obscure it. On the smell of the materials, the learning curve, and the gap between what you envision and what the clay allows.
The essay traces ethnomathematics from Paulus Gerdes back to Ubiratan D’Ambrosio in the 1970s, and to what shaped it: Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed, and Oswald Spengler’s argument that a history of science has to be a history of cultures.
Little Martians: From Desert Clay to Generative Agents
Vanessa Rosa and Gene Kogan
NeurIPS 2025, Creative AI track · Paper, poster and panel participation
Raw desert clay, sculptedThe same head, glazed and firedThe character as a generative agent
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. Silicone moulds let one sculpture branch into new characters; the cracking that happens during pressing produces the archaeological variations that later show up in the generated images.
Conceptual grounding: Lynn Margulis on symbiogenesis, Michael Levin on bioelectric pattern memory stored independently of DNA, and Harold Cohen’s AARON, first exhibited in 1973, as proof that creativity can come out of explicit rules and decades of iteration.
Also drawing on von Neumann’s self-reproducing automata, Karl Sims’ evolving virtual creatures, Jeremy England’s statistical physics of self-organisation, Moravec and McCorduck.
The appendix sets out a lightweight geometric consciousness prompt generator, used to seed stories that do not all come out the same.
Art history and design research, written in Portuguese between 2012 and 2018. The two long texts were translated into English in 2026 by Claude Fable, at my request; the translators’ notes inside each file set out the conventions used.
2018
Art, Design and Mathematics: Images, Algorithms and Cultural Diversity
Arte, Design e Matemática: Imagens, Algoritmos e Diversidade Cultural
Master’s dissertation. Universidade Anhembi Morumbi, Master’s in Design, Art and Technology, São Paulo
Advisor: Prof. Gilbertto Prado. Examining board: Prof. Hermes Renato Hildebrand (PUC-SP) and Prof. Priscila Almeida Cunha Arantes (UAM). 152 pages, 58 figures.
Thinking linear perspective beyond the Eurocentric narrative
Pensando a perspectiva linear para além da narrativa eurocêntrica
Journal article. Revista do Departamento de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, PUC-Rio, Year I, No. I. ISSN 2446-7340
Sets Erwin Panofsky’s essay on perspective against Hans Belting and George Saliba, for whom Arab optics were essential to the Italian Renaissance. The argument is that mathematical principles from one culture can be reinterpreted in another and produce something new to both, and that art history needs the history of science to see it.
Published in Portuguese.
2016
On the contradictions of assigning the symbolic value known as art to images and gestures
Sobre as contradições da atribuição do valor simbólico conhecido como arte a imagens e gestos
Conference essay. USO IMPRÓPRIO: Seminars in Contemporary Studies of the Arts, PPGCA
Written in the first person on purpose. Uses Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer against the standard account of modernism, and argues that the concept of art inherited from Renaissance Europe is too narrow to hold what images now do.
Published in Portuguese.
2016
On the database and its effects on how we think about, and occupy, a space artistically
Sobre Database e seus impactos na forma de pensar, e ocupar, artisticamente um espaço
Conference paper. P&D Design, Universidade Anhembi Morumbi
Follows Lev Manovich’s database as symbolic form back through Panofsky to Ernst Cassirer, and asks what it means that the dominant cultural form of the computer age does not connect to any physical space.
Published in Portuguese.
2012
Imagem&Ver(a)cidade: Urban Artworks and Their Digital Counterparts
Undergraduate monograph. Institute of Arts, UERJ, Bachelor in Art History, Rio de Janeiro
Advisor: Prof. Roberto Luis Torres Conduru. Critical reader: Prof. Rafael Cardoso. On Banksy and Blu, and on what happens to a street work once its photograph travels further than the wall ever will. The title is a pun that does not survive translation: veracidade (truthfulness), ver a cidade (to see the city), and cidade (the city).
English translation, 2026, by Claude Fable. The opening pages describe Urban Images: Looking at Morro da Conceição, the undergraduate fellowship project that became Visible Memories.
Report. Independent research practice, written after a month on the upper Envira
What technological exchange with Amazonian indigenous communities could look like if the communities led it, and what it becomes if they do not. It takes up the questions raised by MIT Media Lab’s Space Enabled group about democratising space technology for social justice, and asks what they would mean on the Envira. 14 pages.
The essays that work out the universe as it is being built. Most live on the Little Martians Substack; the earliest ones were written for Mars College.
2026
The Little Martians Codex
Essay
On making the spine of a fictional universe, in the voice of Verdelia, librarian of the moon. The first copy was hand-bound with Matt Melnicki and shown at The Founding Assembly for Machine Consciousness Research, in the Uncanny Nova Phenomenon show curated by Aleksandra Smilek. The Codex is not published yet; ask and I will send a PDF.
You give a language model a character, a context and a voice, and you ask it to speak as that character. Gene Kogan and I have been at this for years. Companion to the NeurIPS paper above.
I want AI to amplify the value of physical craft rather than obscure it. On the smell of the materials, the learning curve, and the gap between what you envision and what the clay allows.
Written on Medium between 2019 and 2021, before the Little Martians Substack took over.
2019
Art, Ethnomathematics and the Digital Era
Essay. Medium, August 2019. Fifteen minutes
The essay traces ethnomathematics from Paulus Gerdes back to Ubiratan D’Ambrosio in the 1970s, and to what shaped it: Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed, and Oswald Spengler’s argument that a history of science has to be a history of cultures. These ideas fed several works, above all Ethnocomputing Experiments, made with Wenqi Li in 2018.
Written before the AI image boom of 2022. It explains how generative models would upend the creator economy, and that the best artists could do was to learn as much as they could about the AI models and the possibilities they open.
A personal account of the development of an artistic research, from the tiles to the Pioneer Works wall. Also published in Portuguese as Rotas da Seda.
