[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Miljohn_WGHW-Preferred-2_3.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tAs I stood in front of a black screen, a luminous alien creature with five legs and translucent antennae appeared. After a minute, it morphed into an isopod with larger, more articulated limbs. Fathoms (Tartarapelagic)<\/em>, 2025\u201326, by Miljohn Ruperto, uses AI to generate otherworldly creatures like these, all based on species recently discovered in the Pacific Ocean\u2019s Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ). But there\u2019s a dark irony: the extensive mining of manganese, nickel, copper, and cobalt in the CCZ\u2014minerals essential for AI technology\u2014have endangered the lives of the actual species.<\/p>\n \n\tNearly every billboard on the road into Palo Alto\u2014where Ruperto\u2019s work is on view at Stanford\u2019s Cantor Arts Center\u2014advertises a different AI tool. There, Ruperto suggests that to know is partly to destroy.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI think of it as a moral position,\u201d Ruperto said, when I asked him about this bind. \u201cThe current moment is directing us towards fractured individuation, and I want to show our entanglement, \u201c he explained\u2014adding, with a smile, \u201cIt\u2019s OK to be entangled.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tHe\u2019s also showing a reanimation of a mile-high, two-day dust storm captured in a 1977 photograph by a Chevron employee, whose company\u2019s extractive agricultural practices partly caused the disaster. Another work, a book, maps the locations of 123,663 stars around a planet thought to contain diamond cores\u2014intriguing to scientists and shareholders alike. \u201cOnce you name something,\u201d Ruperto says in the catalog, \u201cit\u2019s already over.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tStanding in the show, I felt as if I were facing an enormous, swirling mass of darkness and stars\u2014and trying to contain it all in tiny cups labeled \u201cscience,\u201d \u201cmedicine,\u201d \u201cart,\u201d or \u201ctechnology.\u201d This is how we cope with the unknown: we shape it in our image so we can control it. Ruperto\u2019s five framed renditions of Caspar David Friedrich\u2019s Monk by the Sea<\/em> (1808\u201310) show that famous figure nearly swallowed by the horizon of an encroaching storm. Here Ruperto presents a counterfeit Western sublime: his canvases were produced in a village in China famous for making copies of European paintings. Below the reproductions, seven CRT TV\u2019s play re-enactments of a 1961 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents<\/em> in which a drunk college student is led to believe that he killed his best friend and buried him at the shore. We are left searching for a salvation that may not exist.<\/p>\n \n\tIn the show, a cloth tent features three versions of a Thomas Cole painting that Ruperto re-created using the computer graphics software Unreal Engine. At the center of the tent, visitors can slip on a pair of Meta VR goggles, as if surveying the land themselves. I got in line. Cole\u2019s paintings were meant to present North America as empty and ripe for the taking, essentially, immersive advertisements to prompt settlers to imagine themselves there. Ruperto brilliantly situates our moment\u2019s power grab for the next digital frontier within a longer history of colonial conquest.<\/p>\n \n\tWhen it was my turn, the attendant sanitized the goggles and I adjusted them over my head. For a minute, it was dark. Immersed inside the Cole painting, I wandered down the valley at dusk, arriving at the campsite, where Ruperto brought to life a 19th-century Christian sect that believed the world would end on October 22, 1844. The Millerites, as they were known, began to appear around me frozen in various states of panic while they realized that the world was not going to end.<\/p>\n \n\tThat work, What God Hath Wrought (Kairos)<\/em>, is the third part of Ruperto\u2019s \u201cThe Great Disappointment\u201d series (2026\u2013), commissioned by the Cantor. These works collapse time and present multiple versions of the same day: in some versions the apocalypse does occur.<\/p>\n \n\tPart one of this series, Ultimate Days (Aion), 2026<\/em>, is currently on view at the Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco. There, with the help of Stanford physics professor Hideo Mabuchi, Ruperto has simulated a camera obscura that runs a 24-hour generative stream of the Millerites\u2019 judgment day. Nothing much happens, but the work is pensive and monumental, an enormous orb waiting for the world to end.<\/p>\n \n\tAccompanying this work at the Minnesota Street Project is a new film called The New Society,<\/em> an AI-generated animation about a society where children are raised in a simulation of total egalitarianism. After a certain age, the children are sent to establish the new world, while everyone else has to \u201cremain in the world that we have broken.\u201d It\u2019s a dystopian thriller: a young child escapes her confines at a roadside diner and is met with a hateful diatribe against this promise of her egalitarian society. Then she hears a more hopeful monologue from a zealot who worked on The New Society.<\/em> Tongues morph into lips, and the language of the monologue did not sync with the voices. I kept waiting for some critical turn\u2014for the film to address the means of its making, or the dark, medium-specific irony that pervaded much of Ruperto\u2019s other work.<\/p>\n \n\tAt the opening, Ruperto told me he was interested in the myth of Aristophanes\u2014in the idea that we had all been split from our perfect halves, left to search for completion. He said that AI would provide us with this perfect other half, but that getting what you want would not necessarily provide meaning. Perhaps this new film did just that, portraying a kind of perfect egalitarian society that so many yearn for, but also showing us that getting what we want without real process feels hollow, uncanny, artificial.<\/p>\n \n\tAs I passed the AI billboards again heading back to the airport, I kept picturing visitors in Meta headsets at the Cantor. They were as much a part of the exhibition as the Thomas Cole images: ciphers for our current moment, minds enraptured by vision, blind to the room around them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-in-america\/aia-reviews\/stanford-miljohn-ruperto-ai-cantor-minnesota-street-project-1234778214\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Miljohn_WGHW-Preferred-2_3.jpg?w=1024″] As I stood in front of a black screen, a luminous alien creature with five legs and translucent antennae appeared. After a minute, it morphed into an isopod with larger, more articulated limbs. Fathoms (Tartarapelagic), 2025\u201326, by Miljohn Ruperto, uses AI to generate otherworldly creatures like these, all based on species recently […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1838379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1838379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1838379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1838379\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1838379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1838379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1838379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}