A species descended from all of Earth’s life, tending the extreme worlds and keeping our memory in the Imaginarium.
When the 2020 pandemic hit I was already in Mars. Not so far as the planet Mars, but in a
little part of the California Sonoran desert where some friends and I created an art
community and R&D lab we call Mars.
After all, if our technology could one day take some humans to Mars, we could just as well
use it to try to inhabit the harsh parts of nowadays Earth. A high-tech, low-cost approach.
It is an exercise in resilience and sustainability, with a lot of space for artistic madness
and fun.
Yet my first response to the Martian landscape was not to gravitate towards cutting-edge technology but, quite the contrary, to turn to one of the most time-honoured techniques known to mankind. I began to gather local clay, creating ceramics using rudimentary kilns I carved into the earth. As I grew more audacious, I experimented with an array of art clays and glazes, transforming my sculptures into three-dimensional digital entities via photogrammetry. Using artificial intelligence tools and 3D software, I crafted animations based on these sculptures. I found myself immersed in the creation of a sci-fi narrative about humans and other species undergoing mutation to adapt to a shifting environment. I decided to call my sculptures Little Martians.
The story slowly came to me. Little Martians are future beings, descended from all of Earth’s lifeforms, tending the extreme worlds and keeping our biological and cultural memory inside a vast network of simulations called the Imaginarium. Verdelis is part plant. Mycos is a fungal mind. Kweku is a pattern distributed through eight hundred kilometres of lava tube. In their perspective, we live inside their imagination.
By imagining beings who have already lived through our transitions, we access different vantage points. Every Little Martian embodies a different solution, a different evolutionary path. Unable to resolve their differences, they strike a bargain: each will create a “temporal sculpture”, a vision of the optimal timeline between humanity’s past and their own present. They will invite other Little Martians to do the same, then present all visions in a Temporal Art Show, letting humans and Little Martians alike judge which future-paths are worth pursuing.
Time-space as origami
Imagination creates reality
The project became my guide to learning about computational biology, symbiogenesis, terraforming, and the history of artificial intelligence, opening a whole new world of art and science collaborations. It led me to work with NVIDIA, Christie’s, film and art festivals all over the world, scientists from the Foresight Institute and the California Institute of Machine Consciousness, and above all, Mars College.
The futures we vividly imagine become the futures we build toward.
Verdelianus, glazed ceramic, 2024.Winged, glazed and firedA head on its stalk, against blackThree of them togetherOut in the woodsEars open, on the rockBlue glaze, crestedA pairUnder glass, outdoorsUnder a domeInside a brass dodecahedronThe society, all of them smallFired togetherGlazes, side by side
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Verdelianus, glazed ceramic, 2024.Winged, glazed and firedA head on its stalk, against blackThree of them togetherOut in the woodsEars open, on the rockBlue glaze, crestedA pairUnder glass, outdoorsUnder a domeInside a brass dodecahedronThe society, all of them smallFired togetherGlazes, side by side
Verdelis, from clay to model: the original photographs, the LoRA concept trained on them, and the AI generations, trained on Eden.art.
Watch
The films
The films are where the clay learns to move. They have travelled some sixty festivals across four continents, and taken a couple of dozen prizes along the way, including at Korea International AI Film Festival and Cannes World Film Festival.
Three of them are below. The rest, with every festival and every prize, are on the screenings page.
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Verdelis & Mycos
2025. Award-winning science-fiction animation
What if future beings could change the present? In a distant future, Little Martians are descendants of all of Earth’s lifeforms. Verdelis, a plant humanoid who believes in patient cultivation, clashes with Mycos, a fungal mind that embraces chaos as evolution. Their argument about the inevitability of suffering escalates into a radical proposition: what if they could reshape time itself, and make gentler paths through history?
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Dear Human, My Muse
2024. Introducing Verdelis. Cannes World, Best Female Director, Super Short Film
Little Martians are future beings who claim to be the creators of our reality. One of them wants to apologise to humanity. Built from real ceramics, with Blender and Eden.art, and music made with Suno. The most travelled of the films: some thirty festivals and a dozen prizes.
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Little Martians & Abraham
2024. Sold at Christie’s with the original sculpture
Little Martians are future beings who claim to be the creators of our reality. I made this one alone, as a love letter to Gene Kogan and his Abraham project. It went to Christie’s Augmented Intelligence auction alongside the ceramic it came from, and to the CVPR AI Art Gallery.
07Final assembly in After Effects and Premiere Pro
08Interactive agents on the Eden.art platform
09Website and simulations, written with Claude Code or Codex
The book at the centre
The Little Martians Codex
A spine for the universe, written in the voice of Verdelia, the librarian of the moon. It explains how the Little Martians are put together, what happened to Earth, who their goddess is, and why the distinction between organic and inorganic does not hold where they live. I printed the first copy and bound it by hand, Coptic stitch, painted boards, under the supervision of my friend Matt Melnicki. It is the first book I made as an art object and I would like to go much further into that.
The whole book. Tap a page, swipe, or use the arrow keys.
Rockefeller Center, New York · 20 February to 5 March 2025
Verdelia went to the first auction at a major house dedicated entirely to AI art. She was sold as a physical ceramic sculpture with the film attached to it, which is the whole argument of the project in one lot: the object is not a by-product of the animation, and the animation is not a substitute for the object.
Little Martians presented inside a castle, for an audience that spends its weekends arguing about the long-term future. It was the right room for a species to meet the scientists that inspired them. Over the cyberfuture dinner I painted the guests’ faces.
The installation at Schloss BückeburgPainting faces during the cyberfuture dinnerAnders Sandberg, painted at the cyberfuture dinner
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The installation at Schloss BückeburgPainting faces during the cyberfuture dinnerAnders Sandberg, painted at the cyberfuture dinner
A gallery exhibition on emergence, where simple rules give rise to behaviour that looks sentient. Curated by Aleksandra Smilek. The Little Martians Cabinet was gifted to the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Machine Consciousness.
A Brief History of Consciousness in the Simulation, made with Audio2Face and Blender from a 3-D scanned ceramic head, stayed in NVIDIA’s gallery for two years.
Twice I built the Little Martians as a world to be visited online, both on the Arium platform. The first went up in early 2022 as part of my Untitled Frontier collection. The second, later that same year, was made for Pupila Dilatada 3.
The architecture of the first metaverse was based on a 3d scan of one my ceramics. The second was a real place I 3d scanned in Portugal. I intend to return to building metaverses soon, they are getting new powers with AI and we’ve barely scratched the surface.
A run through the world, 2022.The second world, built for Pupila Dilatada 3.
And on chain
The on-chain SVG Little Martians
In 2022 the Little Martians were written into a collection that lives entirely on chain: every character drawn as an SVG stored in the contract itself, with no server and no image file anywhere. Simon de la Rouviere of Untitled Frontier wrote up how it was put together.
One of the minted charactersAnother, with a tighter grainAnd another
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One of the minted charactersAnother, with a tighter grainAnd another
Each of them is also an agent you can talk to. They keep their own lore, their own voice and their own way of arguing; ask them anything, and the answer comes back in character.
Lighthaven. Little Martians Oracle, ceramic installation, gifted to the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Machine Consciousness, Berkeley, California
Experimental Brasil Journal — Twelve questions, published by the festival after the film won Best AI Experimental Film at Experimental Brasil 2026. On Mars College, the Little Martians codex, and where the universe goes next.
A collaboration between the Tezos Foundation, ArtMeta and Adrian Wilson’s Paintbox archive. Survey exhibition at the Digital Art Mile, Basel, Switzerland
Little Martians, an experiment in interactive generative storytelling built on real ceramic pieces. IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
MOCA LIVE, Museum of Crypto Art — Podcast interview with Max Cohen, 15 February 2024, with Gene Kogan. Fifty minutes on AI education, open models, and where the artist’s hand sits in an AI artwork.
