As I stood in front of a black screen, a glowing alien creature with five legs and translucent tentacles appeared. A minute later, it transformed into an isopod with larger, more jointed limbs. Yingxun (Tatar)2025-26, by Miljohn Ruperto, uses artificial intelligence to generate these otherworldly creatures, all based on recently discovered species in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) of the Pacific Ocean. But here’s the irony: Large-scale mining of manganese, nickel, copper and cobalt (minerals essential for AI technology) in CCZs has endangered the lives of actual species.
Nearly every billboard on the road to Palo Alto (Stanford University’s Cantor Center for the Arts is exhibiting Ruperto’s work) promotes a different AI tool. There, Ruperto suggests that understanding means, in part, destruction.
“I think it’s a moral stance,” Ruperto said when I asked him about this bondage. “The current moment is leading us toward broken personalities, and I wanted to show our entanglement,” he explains, adding with a smile, “It’s OK to be entangled.”
He also showed a photo taken by a Chevron employee in 1977 showing the resurgence of a mile-high, two-day dust storm, a disaster that was partly caused by the company’s extractive farming practices. Another work, a book mapping the locations of 123,663 stars around a planet thought to contain a diamond core, has piqued the interest of scientists and shareholders. “Once you name something,” Ruperto says in the catalog, “it’s all over.”
Standing in the exhibit, I felt as if I was facing a mass of swirling darkness and stars, and trying to contain it all in little cups labeled “Science,” “Medicine,” “Art,” or “Technology.” This is how we deal with the unknown: we shape it according to our imagination so that we can control it. Ruperto presents framed interpretations of five works by Caspar David Friedrich monk on the beach (1808-10) shows the famous figure nearly swallowed by the horizon of an approaching storm. Ruperto here presents a fake Western sublime: his canvases were made in a Chinese village famous for copying European paintings. Below the replica are 7 CRT TV dramas recreating a 1961 episode Alfred Hitchcock presents A drunken college student believed he killed his best friend and buried him on the shore. We are looking for a salvation that may not exist.
During the show, a fabric tent displayed three versions of Thomas Cole paintings that Ruperto had recreated using the computer graphics software Unreal Engine. In the center of the tent, visitors can put on Meta VR goggles and feel as if they are surveying the land. I got in line. Cole’s paintings were intended to represent the empty, ripe state of North America and were essentially immersive advertisements, prompting settlers to imagine themselves there. Ruperto brilliantly situates our current scramble for power over the next digital frontier within a longer history of colonial conquest.
When it was my turn, the attendant sanitized the goggles and I adjusted them to my head. In an instant, it became dark. At dusk, I immersed myself in Cole’s paintings and wandered down the valley to the campsite where Ruperto resurrected a 19th-century Christian sect that believed the world would end on October 22, 1844. Millerites (as they were called) began to appear around me, and they realized that the world was not going to end, and they went into various states of panic.
that job, Everything God does (Kairos)is the third part of Ruperto’s “The Great Disappointment” series (2026-), commissioned by Cantor. These works collapse time and present multiple versions of the same day: in some versions, the end of the world actually happened.
The first article in this series, Final Days (Aion), 2026currently on display at the Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco. There, with the help of Stanford University physics professor Hideo Mabuchi, Ruperto simulated a camera obscura that could run the Millerites’ Judgment Day generative stream 24 hours a day. Nothing major happens, but the piece is meditative and monumental, like a giant sphere awaiting the end of the world.
Accompanying this work at the Minnesota Street Project is a film titled new society, An AI-generated animation about a society that raises children in a simulated total egalitarianism. After a certain age, children are sent off to build new worlds, while others must “remain in the world we broke.” It’s a dystopian thriller: a young child escapes his confines at a roadside diner, only to be met with a hateful diatribe against the promise of an egalitarian society. Then she heard a more hopeful monologue from an enthusiast who had devoted new society. The tongue becomes the lips, and the language of the monologue is out of sync with the voice. I kept waiting for some crucial twist—for the film to address the means of its production, or for the dark, medium-specific satire that permeates Ruperto’s other work.
At the opening, Ruperto told me that he was interested in Aristophanes’ myth that we are all split from perfect halves and left to find wholeness. He said that artificial intelligence will provide us with the perfect partner, but getting what you want doesn’t necessarily make sense. Perhaps this new film does just that, depicting a perfectly egalitarian society that many aspire to, but also showing us that getting what we want without a real process can feel hollow, miraculous, and contrived.
As I passed the AI billboard again and returned to the airport, I kept imagining tourists wearing Meta headsets at Cantor. They are as much a part of the exhibition as the images of Thomas Cole: ciphers for our current moment, minds bewildered by vision, blind to the room around them.
