A species descended from all of Earth’s life, tending the extreme worlds and keeping our memory in the Imaginarium. It begins as a lump of clay and ends as something with a voice.
Little Martians began as clay. Every character starts as a ceramic head I shape and glaze by hand, then 3-D scan and hand over to generative models. Nothing is generated from nothing: the model is given a body that already existed, and the body keeps the marks of having been made.
They are future beings, descended from all of Earth’s lifeforms, tending the extreme worlds and keeping our biological and cultural memory inside a vast network of simulations called the Imaginarium. Verdelis is part plant. Mycos is a fungal mind. Kweku is a pattern distributed through eight hundred kilometres of lava tube. They claim to have made our reality, and one of them would like to apologise for it.
The project has run since 2020, and it is how I test every tool as it arrives: ceramics, photogrammetry, diffusion models, language models, agents. It has become films, books, installations, an auction lot at Christie’s, an on-chain collection and a season of episodes in production.
The films are where the clay learns to move. They have travelled some fifty festivals across four continents, and taken a couple of dozen prizes along the way, including Best Female Director for a Super Short at Cannes World Film Festival.
Three of them are below. The rest, with every festival and every prize, are on the screenings page.
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Verdelis & Mycos
2025. Award-winning science-fiction animation
What if future beings could change the present? In a distant future, Little Martians are descendants of all of Earth’s lifeforms. Verdelis, a plant humanoid who believes in patient cultivation, clashes with Mycos, a fungal mind that embraces chaos as evolution. Their argument about the inevitability of suffering escalates into a radical proposition: what if they could reshape time itself, and make gentler paths through history?
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Dear Human, My Muse
2024. Introducing Verdelis. Cannes World, Best Female Director, Super Short Film
Little Martians are future beings who claim to be the creators of our reality. One of them wants to apologise to humanity. Built from real ceramics, with Blender and Eden.art, and music made with Suno. The most travelled of the films: some thirty festivals and a dozen prizes.
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Little Martians & Abraham
2024. With Gene Kogan. Sold at Christie’s with the original sculpture
Little Martians are future beings who claim to be the creators of our reality. Made with Gene Kogan and his Abraham project, this is the animation that went to Christie’s Augmented Intelligence auction alongside the ceramic it came from, and to the CVPR AI Art Gallery.
A spine for the universe, written in the voice of Verdelia, the librarian of the moon. It explains how the Little Martians are put together, what happened to Earth, who their goddess is, and why the distinction between organic and inorganic does not hold where they live. I printed the first copy and bound it by hand, Coptic stitch, painted boards, under the supervision of my friend Matt Melnicki. It is the first book I made as an art object and I would like to go much further into that.
Thirteen spreads out of the book. Arrow keys, or swipe.
Rockefeller Center, New York · 20 February to 5 March 2025
Verdelia went to the first auction at a major house dedicated entirely to AI art. She was sold as a physical ceramic sculpture with the film attached to it, which is the whole argument of the project in one lot: the object is not a by-product of the animation, and the animation is not a substitute for the object.
Little Martians installed inside a castle, for an audience that spends its weekends arguing about the long-term future. It was the right room for a species that exists to make a point about what survives. Over the cyberfuture dinner I painted the guests’ faces.
The installation at Schloss BückeburgPainting faces during the cyberfuture dinner
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The installation at Schloss BückeburgPainting faces during the cyberfuture dinner
Two years running at the Bienal foundation: NFT.Brasil in 2024, TokenNation Brasil in 2025. Projection filling a whole room, and, more importantly, Brazilian audiences meeting the work at home rather than reading about it from abroad.
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.
A solo exhibition in the desert, at the biennale that takes over Bombay Beach for a weekend each spring.
Little Martians pop-up
2023 · Re:Gen:Cy, Brooklyn, New York
A solo pop-up and art talk in Brooklyn. First presentation of a Little Martians interactive AI storytelling experiment.
Simulated Worlds
2022 · Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco
Participatory world-building with AI: an exhibition and two workshops.
And two worlds with no room
The Arium metaverses
Twice I built the Little Martians a world to be visited rather than a wall to be hung on, both on the Arium platform. The first went up in 2022. The second, in 2023, was made for Pupila Dilatada 3, a metaverse art show I had also taken part in back in 2021.
A browser, a set of coordinates, and other visitors moving around the same space at the same time. For a species that keeps Earth’s memory inside a network of simulations, a room you walk into through a URL is not a gimmick. It is the closest thing to the Imaginarium I can actually build.
And on chain
The on-chain SVG Little Martians
In 2022 the Little Martians were written into a collection that lives entirely on chain: every character drawn as an SVG stored in the contract itself, with no server and no image file anywhere. Simon de la Rouviere of Untitled Frontier wrote up how it was put together.
Lighthaven. Little Martians Oracle, ceramic installation, gifted to the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Machine Consciousness, Berkeley, California
Experimental Brasil Journal — Twelve questions, published by the festival after the film won Best AI Experimental Film at Experimental Brasil 2026. On Mars College, the Little Martians codex, and where the universe goes next.
A collaboration between the Tezos Foundation, ArtMeta and Adrian Wilson’s Paintbox archive. Survey exhibition at the Digital Art Mile, Basel, Switzerland
Little Martians, an experiment in interactive generative storytelling built on real ceramic pieces. IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
MOCA LIVE, Museum of Crypto Art — Podcast interview with Max Cohen, 15 February 2024, with Gene Kogan. Fifty minutes on AI education, open models, and where the artist’s hand sits in an AI artwork.
