Future beings who care about us
Ceramic heads, made by hand, transformed into AI powered characters.
Little Martians began as clay. The heads are shaped and glazed by hand, then 3-D scanned and handed to generative models. I co-create their world with AI, testing the tools as they evolve, learning about minds and possible futures while I imagine who they are.
The work has run since 2020 as installations, films, books and exhibitions. It went to Christie’s first AI art auction, the NVIDIA AI Art Gallery, CVPR and NeurIPS, and it has collected some dozens of festival awards along the way.
Mars College is a three-month school, research lab and off-grid community on a dry lake bed near Bombay Beach, California, dedicated to a low-cost, high-tech life. The campus is built from scratch each winter from pallet racks and plywood, runs on solar, and is taken down again in the spring.
Vanessa has been part of the core team since it began in 2020. She paints murals, teaches workshops, hosts people and does the hundred unglamorous things a temporary town needs. Several of the projects on this page were made there, or were inspired by it.
The films, and the prizes and selections they have travelled through: Cannes World, Seoul, Milan, Bangkok, Dubai, Reykjavík and some fifty more.
Two hundred and fifty square metres of painting wrapped around the Center for Art and Innovation in Red Hook, Brooklyn, made in 2017. Custom laser-cut stencils were used to create optical illusions of arches, azulejo blues, Adinkra and arabesque forms pushed into surreal perspectives.
Exhibitions, installations and the work made for them, newest first.
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.
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A three-channel, projection-mapped installation in which artificial minds perform their own worlds from inside a painted theatre stage.
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Verdelia went to the first auction at a major house dedicated to AI art, 20 February to 5 March 2025. She was sold as a physical sculpture with a digital film attached.
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Two years running at the Bienal foundation in São Paulo, for NFT.Brasil in 2024 and TokenNation Brasil in 2025. Projection filling a room, and Brazilian audiences meeting the work at home.
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Little Martians shown inside a hundred-year-old castle, to an audience of people arguing about the long-term future.
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A solo exhibition in the desert, at the biennale that takes over Bombay Beach for a weekend each spring.
A solo pop-up and art talk in Brooklyn. First presentation of a Little Martians interactive AI storytelling experiment.
Two weeks in a château in Burgundy, once a year, with artists, technologists, writers and collectors who work across digital and physical media. I have taken part in all four editions: 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. Most of what came out of it were friendships and the collaborations that followed.
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Participatory world-building with AI: an exhibition and two workshops.
An immersive installation with Same Putumi and Verônica Natividade, 14 February to 10 March 2019, curated by Milton Guran and Monica Maia.
View project → The show at MIS →
With Wenqi Li, shown at Second Sundays on 8 April 2018 and open to 22 April. Chokwe Sona patterns from Angola, redrawn in Processing along the heritage algorithm that produced them, projected over a painting built from Vredeman de Vries’ seventeenth-century treatise on linear perspective.
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A two-person exhibition with Gérard Quenum, 30 September to 23 November 2017, made during a one-month residency. Dialogue: nine of his portraits taken over by azulejo and Adinkra patterns, a mural in the sculpture garden, and two canvases of my own.
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An exhibition that is also a game, with Verônica Natividade and Wenqi Li, 3 to 24 August 2017. Representations of infinity from different cultures, in paintings, code, video mapping and mirrored boxes.
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A solo show of the tile work in March and April 2017: azulejo, Adinkra and arabesque pushed through linear perspective until the perspective itself becomes the subject rather than the frame. The statement was written by the Iranian artist Marjan Fadavi.
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My first massive institutional show. Thirteen artists on the urban scene, and I took the parts of the building nobody had asked for: a hanging drawing of downtown Rio behind the stairway, gouache passengers on the steps, and an anamorphic landscape wrapped around the columns upstairs. I produced the show as well.
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I created a mural for this art gallery in November 2012, as a distorted mirror of the surrounding antique stores.
Longer projects, each with a page of its own.
Fifteen years of friendship with the photographer of Morro da Providência: paintings made from his archive, and then two attempts, three years apart, to put the same photographs through machines.
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Where all of it started: walls in Rio, Chile, Berlin, Lisbon, Cotonou and New York, usually painted with other people.
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Silvio Tendler’s seven-part series on Ferreira Gullar’s exile. More than twenty time-lapse painting animations and forty drawings, broadcast on TV Brasil.
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A publishing house built by one family in a living room, and the books that came out of it. Diana’s World, the Little Martians titles, the Codex bound by hand.
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Six drawings of a Qing vase made with an AxiDraw pen plotter, each one different because I moved the paper or the pen while the machine worked. With the Escher and the perspective treatises behind them.
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What I love most is to draw wherever I am. Sketches made on the streets and in life model sessions.
Open the page →The smaller pieces: flags for a samba school parade, the mural at Artur Fidalgo, and a sculpture from 2009.
High-resolution images, installation shots, technical requirements, the full CV and a press pack are available on request. Most works exist in more than one form. A mural can travel as a projection, a ceramic piece as a film.