The current work presents a visual field at once opulent and destabilized—a hybrid of mechanical anatomy, botanical form, and painterly distortion. Rendered as a digital jacquard tapestry, this series embodies a layered temporal logic: contemporary digital collage translated into one of the oldest mechanical image-making traditions, the woven textile. This medium is no passive substrate. The warp and weft themselves become part of the epistemological proposition: a coded, binary surface where images do not simply sit, but are structurally embedded, materially encrypted.
Model Collapse
The compositions evoke the formal conventions of painting traditions, though violently interrupted with intent—devoured, perhaps, by forces both digital and primal. Blossoms bloom with synthetic textures. Petals give way to armored joints. Root systems are replaced with serpentine cords and wiring. Flesh, metal, and color fold into one another with a fluidity that resists categorical reading. Yet nothing is arbitrary. Each fragment is meticulously distorted, as if passed through an algorithmic unconscious—a hand-wrought procedure born of the age of mechanical reproduction, updated for the age of machine learning and visual saturation in a world of collapsing political, moral, social, and natural ecosystems.
The effect is both hallucinatory and rigorous. The ghost of Romantic painting haunts the images—Caspar David Friedrich meets Future Shock—but this is not nostalgia. This is a purposeful confrontation with the collapse of symbolic hierarchies: nature and machine, figure and ground, sacred and synthetic. The work does not mourn this collapse. It is composed of it.
In this sense, the tapestry performs what Max Ernst called “complete transmutation”—a poetic collision of incompatible realities. Where Ernst described the Surrealist collage as the chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table, The model collapse series dissects the table itself. The result is not just uncanny, but ontologically unstable: a tapestry that dreams of painting, a botanical form made of prosthetics, a digital image that carries the gravity of myth.
What emerges is not chaos, but a new kind of order—tentative, polymorphic, and strangely beautiful. The tapestries do not offer resolution. They offer an encounter with the extra metaphysical, the artificial sublime, and with the viewer’s own desire to decode what resists final meaning. In an age of collapsed models—ecological, symbolic, political—this work suggests that from dissonance, a different kind of harmony might be woven.
