Centaurs
14.07.2025
For the last few years, I’ve rejected many technological advancements, from AI to the latest phones and social media. I hated it all. I prioritised the physical over the digital. Recently, though, I’ve had a shift in attitude, and I’m not sure if I’m going bonkers or just being lured by the tech overlords.
This change happened while working on this drawing. After finishing the composition, I was left with just outlines and wanted to see how AI would shade it, if it even could; the results shocked me and sent me down a depressing rabbit hole. True, the AI didn’t create the image from scratch; I did. It took me ages. But the speed at which it processed, understood, and filled the drawing was incredible. It took 20 minutes. I took 20 hours. It felt like game over. I knew AI and robotics would change jobs—lawyers, accountants, builders—but not artists?
AI is now on track to connect directly to our brains. Neuralink, founded by Elon Musk (oh no), is already conducting human trials to implant mini-computers into people’s brains! Letting them browse the web, control robotic limbs, and send messages just by thinking. To me, creating is an attempt to materialise an idea into the world. It’s never a perfect translation; something always gets lost, and something new appears. But what will happen when AI does the translating for us faster, maybe better?
In May 1997, the chess computer Deep Blue defeated Grand Master Garry Kasparov, marking a milestone in AI’s chess capabilities and raising questions about the role of human players as computers excel in memorisation and calculation. One response was Advanced Chess, or Centaur Chess—a form where each player uses a computer engine to explore different moves, pushing the level of play to new heights. In this form, humans and technology aren’t opponents but teammates, working together to win against other centaurs or solo players.
Centaur chess doesn’t solve all the problems tech brings, but it offers an attitude that made me rethink my position. It rejects outright dismissal of new technology and instead encourages an active relationship, becoming a participant in shaping the future, rather than being left behind.
The Hunt of the Unicorn
25.06.2025
At the moment, I’m working on something new. It’s taking time to learn new skills and adapt them to my practice, but the process is pushing me out of my comfort zone and helping me avoid becoming a one-trick pony. While learning and experimenting, I come across new sources of inspiration that quickly become obsessions.
“The Hunt of the Unicorn” is a series of seven tapestries made between 1495 and 1505, likely in Brussels. A single artist didn’t create them, but a collective whose names were never recorded. The series depicts the hunting, trapping, killing, and resurrection of a unicorn. Unicorns, in medieval symbolism, are paradoxical: wild, dangerous, and uncatchable, yet also pure, majestic, and holy, tamed only by a virgin’s touch. The tapestries show this, with the hunters succeeding only through a virgin who lures the unicorn into a false sense of safety. Due to the damaged fifth tapestry, it’s unclear whether the virgin is complicit or coerced by the hunt.
The motif of unicorn entrapment by a virgin was common at the time, so most of the story is familiar, with the unicorn being successfully hunted and killed and taken to the castle until the final tapestry. “The Unicorn in Captivity” shows the slain unicorn resurrected but chained to a tree, enclosed in a small space. No longer wild, it exists in a state of domestic display, alive but contained for all to see.
What fascinates me is the human inability to leave things untouched. The unicorn isn’t just admired; it’s hunted, killed, and harvested for its magical horn. To me, this thirst to demystify and dominate stems from a fear of the unknown, a survival instinct that craves predictability and control in a chaotic world. From that lens, the unicorn becomes a symbol of the “other,” and the hunt is a metaphor for our urge to control what we do not understand. That final tapestry shows the cost of that impulse. The unicorn may still be alive, but it’s no longer free; its wildness is reduced to a spectacle, transforming the unicorn into something else.
