The Algorithmic Bestiary: A Totem Atlas is a sequence of AI-assisted digital collages that treats the internet’s visual culture as a living myth-space. Each work functions like a “field plate” from an imagined anthropology: a crowded ecology of totems—cute, grotesque, sacred, commercial, ancestral—coexisting inside the same frame. The compositions stage a recurring journey through thresholds (fire/ice), guardians (moon-turtle oracle), angels and demons of attention (skull-rose swarms), ruins of public space (graffiti temple), and the archive itself (a stratified wall of scenes). What looks like chaos is structured as a system: repetition, motif migration, and visual contagion. The series asks how algorithmic image systems reshape memory, innocence, violence, and spiritual symbolism, especially within a South African/postcolonial context where images carry both enchantment and injury.

DXARTS relevance: This project treats AI image systems as cultural infrastructure, using collage, worldbuilding, and visual taxonomy to study how algorithmic media reshapes perception, memory, and symbolic life. It can expand into interactive archives, installation, and participatory storytelling.

Method: AI-assisted collage, selection-as-authorship, narrative compositing

Source-generation: diffusion-based image generation + artist-directed prompt cycles to produce “specimens” (characters, masks, icons, landscapes).

Curation as authorship: I treat selection, omission, and grouping as the primary creative act—like editing a documentary from an overwhelming archive.

Compositing & continuity: Photoshop cut-outs, masking, scale logic, lighting harmonization, color grading, and spatial layering to create a coherent “world” inside each plate.

Motif system: recurring symbols (skulls, roses, moon, waves, ancestral faces, toy-like beings) act as narrative anchors that migrate across images.

Iterative critique loop: each plate is revised through multiple passes to strengthen legibility, rhythm, and emotional tone (comic → sacred → ominous → tender).

Output: print-ready digital works + a developing “story bible” that can expand into interactive/installation formats.

Motifs (recurring symbols)

Skulls: memento mori + “data death” (what the internet keeps and what it erases)

Roses/flowers: beauty under pressure; grief with decoration

Moon/water/waves: memory, dream logic, emotional time

Ancestral faces/masks: lineage, cultural memory, the ethics of representation

Cute creatures/toys: innocence as a technology of survival; soft resistance

Urban ruins/graffiti: South African public space as archive and battleground

The Graffiti Temple

A ruined urban interior becomes a shrine: a crowned figure, scattered relics, and small beings colonizing abandoned architecture. Public space is shown as both threat and playground—an ecosystem where power, innocence, and surveillance overlap. The collage reads like a documentary still from a city that has turned into myth.

Angels of Noise

A delirious congregation of skulls, roses, flames, and cartoon faces. This is the attention economy rendered as religious iconography—devotion, hysteria, comedy, and terror braided together. The work asks: what do we worship when images never stop arriving? What becomes “holy” inside a feed?

The Moon Oracle

A quiet guardian holds a crescent staff while a swarm of small spirits gathers like thoughts around a single body. The work frames the “bestiary” not as horror, but as a tenderness: grief, protection, and weird beauty occupying the same space. The moon becomes a navigation device—a soft technology for crossing the night.

Saints of the Signal is a series of AI-assisted icon-images that remixes religious visual grammar—halos, veils, crosses, procession, gold-leaf radiance—into a contemporary vocabulary of networks, masks, and synthetic bodies. The figures are not “religion” in the devotional sense; they are interfaces for belief: witnesses to how authority and comfort are manufactured through light, repetition, and spectacle. The work sits in tension: sanctity versus surveillance, tenderness versus dogma, salvation versus branding. By staging techno-hooded saints, faceless congregations, and radiant voids, the series asks what we will call holy when images are generated at scale, and what kinds of power return disguised as beauty.

DXARTS relevance: This series treats iconography as a media system, testing how generative image tools, aesthetic repetition, and symbolic design manufacture belief, authority, and emotional regulation in contemporary culture.

Method: AI-assisted iconography + compositing + “ritual design”

Icon research: studying visual codes of sanctity (halo geometry, gold illumination, veiling, frontal portraiture, procession).

Generative iteration: prompt-cycles to produce “saint variants,” masks, robes, city-thresholds, and starfield/cross atmospheres.

Authorial selection: curating outputs as if casting roles—choosing facial affect, distance, stillness, and symbolic density.

Photoshop compositing: collage-assembly of figures, backgrounds, halos, and particle fields; scale calibration; tonal unification; gold/blue palette control.

System consistency: repeatable motif rules (cross-as-signal, halo-as-interface, veil-as-filter, gold-as-authority).

Output: print-ready icon plates + a developing “ritual toolkit” (motif dictionary + compositional templates).

Motifs (what repeats and why)

Halo / aureole: not holiness—an attention device (a UI for reverence).

Veil / hood: filtering (identity masked; power protected; grief contained).

Crosses as particles: belief as network signal; faith as data pattern. B

Gold field: authority, wealth, spectacle; the seduction of certainty.

Faceless congregations: institutions without intimacy; belonging without personhood.

City / skyline: the modern cathedral; where control and desire converge.

Procession of the Faceless

Tall, identical forms with halo-discs and cross marks gather like a corporate clergy. A small human figure anchors scale and vulnerability. The scene is not dystopia for its own sake; it’s a question of proportion: what happens to the individual inside the monumental aesthetics of certainty?

City Guardian / Lotus Threshold

A robed figure stands against a night city as gold particles fall like coded rain; a single flower glows nearby. The plate introduces the possibility of tenderness inside the system—beauty not as domination, but as a fragile alternative. It’s a threshold image: witness, resistance, and care.

Death in the Lightfield

A skull-faced robe appears as a clean silhouette within gold grids, memento mori meets interface design. This work punctures the glamour: behind the “sacred UX” of images, mortality and violence remain. It reframes the icon tradition as a confrontation with what systems prefer to hide.

Xeno-Topographies: Field Notes from the Far Archive is a series of AI-assisted, hand-edited image plates that treat the landscape as an archive—a place where history becomes geology and belief becomes architecture. Each plate functions like a “specimen slide”: dunes inscribed with grids, monoliths wrapped like relics, mushroom-towers that behave like infrastructure, and black spheres that read as gravitational temples or data-wells. I build these sequences to test a simple research question: what does power look like when it has no human face—only climate, scale, and pattern? The work is intentionally legible (comic-panel logic, repeated motifs, color scripting) while staying uncanny—inviting viewers to read, infer, and complete the narrative.

DXARTS relevance: At the University of Washington, I want to prototype this as an interactive atlas/installation: viewers navigate plates as a living archive (zoomable map, audio field-notes, responsive typography), testing how narrative meaning changes when the audience controls scale, sequence, and proximity.

Method: AI image synthesis + iterative prompt-writing + curation as authorship + Photoshop compositing (panel layout, masking, scale corrections) + color scripting + grain/print unification.

Working mode: produce many candidates → select for motif continuity (spheres / monoliths / spore-forms / lone witness) → edit for a consistent visual grammar → sequence into plates that read like a report.

Research-through-making: each plate is a hypothesis about perception, scale, and “reading” images.

Systems thinking: environments behave like interfaces (grids, portals, observatories, infrastructural organisms).

Expandable into installation/interaction: the plates can become a navigable atlas (sound, text, AR, map logic, audience choice).

Reliquary Monolith

A wrapped structure: preservation, concealment, and ritual engineering collapse into one form.

Witness Figure

A single body for scale; not a hero, but a measurement tool, proof that the world exceeds us.

The Listening Dunes

A desert that records movement as pattern; the horizon behaves like a memory surface.

Ruin as Interface

Remains of a system whose purpose is unreadable, yet its aesthetics still command belief.

Black Sun Observatory

A gravitational icon that reorganizes the landscape; worship and data storage become indistinguishable.

Cartographic Sky

Grids in the atmosphere: mapping as control, navigation as ideology.

Spore Infrastructure

Mushroom-towers as living architecture: soft tech, ecological networks, distributed intelligence.

Threshold Forms

Objects that look like portals but behave like monuments; entry is promised, never guaranteed.

Spear & Signal is a suite of AI-assisted icon-images that reframes the African warrior archetype as a future sentinel, standing at the edge of savannah, desert, and city-temple skylines. The recurring spear becomes an axis of witnessing; the sun becomes a halo; the horizon becomes a threshold between ancestral memory and technological destiny. These figures are less “characters” than interfaces for sovereignty: guardians of land, time, and moral orientation in an era where power is increasingly mediated by spectacle, data, and design. The series holds a deliberate tension, ritual vs. circuitry, silence vs. propaganda, tenderness vs. force, asking what protection, leadership, and dignity look like when tradition and futurity must share the same sky.

Method: AI-assisted concept illustration + variant iteration + cinematic grading

Visual research: African silhouette language (spear, shield, plume), savannah topology, heroic staging, sunset atmospheres, and Afrofuturist city cues.

Generative iteration: prompt-cycles producing sentinel variants (pose, armor, textile, skyline, halo/sun disc, dust/fog).

Authorial selection: curating outputs like casting—choosing stillness, authority, distance, and symbolic clarity.

Compositing + finishing: tonal unification, silhouette control, rim-light discipline, and palette consistency (ember/orange, dusk violet, teal/neon accents).

System consistency: repeatable motif rules (spear-as-axis, sun-as-halo, acacia-as-root, skyline-as-cathedral, dust-as-history).

Motifs (what repeats and why)

Spear: axis / boundary marker / moral direction (a tool that reads as a symbol).

Sun disc / halo: authority + radiance + mythic scale (power made visible).

Acacia silhouettes: rootedness, endurance, ancestral continuity.

City-temple skyline: the modern cathedral—desire, control, ambition, destiny.

Dust / fog / haze: history in the air; time made atmospheric.

Lotus (rare, crucial): tenderness and renewal inside the warrior grammar.

Twin Guardians of the City-Savannah

A pair of sentinels, masculine/feminine energies, stand as parallel icons facing the same future-temple skyline. The work suggests stewardship as dual: force and discernment, protection and perception.

Cliffwatcher Triptych

A lone figure holds the high ground while variant portraits below intensify armor, glow, and ritual detail. The page is about scale: one body against an entire world-system, deciding what it means to stand firm.

Horizon Guardians

A wide, cinematic hero shot anchors the page, while the lower images sharpen the archetype into emblematic forms. The repeated stance becomes a visual mantra: return, witness, protect.

Meditation Above the Plains

The sentinel shifts from proclamation to contemplation, seated, quiet, watching the world unfold. By pairing stillness with the armed silhouette, the page argues that true power includes restraint and interior discipline.

Circuit Halo Over the Savannah

Halo imagery merges with circuitry-like borders and synthetic skies, turning sanctity into a designed interface. The warrior becomes a node in a larger system—raising the question: who controls the halo?

Dust Procession

A warrior emerges through a storm of ochre and grit, history rendered as weather. The repetition of the walking figure reads as endurance: identity maintained under pressure, visibility earned through survival.

Xenogeography is a series of AI-assisted landscape plates that treat worldbuilding as a form of observation: geology, weather, flora, ruins, and scale cues rendered in a restrained comics/engraving vocabulary. These scenes borrow the visual authority of scientific illustration and bande dessinée linework, clean contour, hatch-shading, limited palettes, then tilt it into speculative ecology: fungal “cathedrals,” cube-drifting sentinels, ringed-planet monoliths, and desert architectures that read like both fossils and machines. The work asks how environments become belief-systems, how a horizon can function as a narrative engine, where “place” is not a backdrop, but an active intelligence shaping the viewer’s sense of time, threat, wonder, and pilgrimage.

Method: AI-assisted environment design + atlas-style curation + compositing

Visual research: Moebius/European comics line traditions, cartographic illustration, sci-fi environment concept art.

Generative iteration: prompt-cycles to generate consistent terrain grammars (monolith geology, fungal forms, deadwood silhouettes, desert architecture).

Authorial selection: curating outputs like field plates—prioritizing legibility, scale cues, and motif continuity.

Palette discipline: constrained pastel and “sunset science” palettes (apricot, mint, violet, gold) to maintain a unified atlas tone.

Compositing + cleanup: horizon calibration, texture unification, edge control, and print/portfolio readiness.

Motifs (what repeats and why)

Monolith spires / needle rock: permanence, witness, deep time.

Fungal towers / bio-structures: alien ecology as architecture; growth as infrastructure.

Cube drift / hovering forms: “signal objects” — technology as weather.

Pilgrim figures / androids: scale + vulnerability; the body as measurement.

Caves with star-fields: interior becomes cosmos; geology as portal.

Dead trees / ash plains: aftermath without explanation; narrative tension.

Dune cities / diagrammatic ruins: civilization rendered as pattern, not portrait.

Sunlit Rifts (Desert Monolith Studies)

A set of harsh, graphic deserts where rock behaves like sculpture, spires, shadows, and carved valleys. The shift between high-chroma skies and near-monochrome ground makes the landscape feel “archival,” as if it’s being catalogued after the fa

Cosmic Groves (Astral Forest Topographies)

A river-valley calm sits beside cosmic-root interiors and a marbled tree-canyon, nature rendered as cosmology. This page reads like an atlas entry for “the sacred ordinary,” where landscape becomes a contemplative device.

Pilgrim & Circuit-Sky (Relic Landscapes)

A towering, uncanny presence share the same quiet desert logic, while a gold schematic/city plate hints at infrastructure beneath the myth. It’s a hinge-page: ecology → system → symbol.

Pastel Badlands (Dunes, Spores, and Ash Trees)

Muted dunes and cratered plains hold dead trees and sparse growth like evidence. The palette is gentle, but the forms imply an event, an ecosystem continuing after rupture, indifferent to explanation.

Bone Towers & Ink Coastlines

A page of cleaner “study plates”: coastal linework, canyon paths, and a bone-like tower-form that feels both creature and monument. It frames environment design as drawing practice, worlds built from decisions about line, contour, and silence.

Oracle Dunes (Sentinels, Trees, and Signal-Storms)

An android sentinel, a moonlit tree-world, and an abstract “signal-vortex” share the same visual grammar: calm surfaces hiding complex forces. This page reads like a thesis statement on atmosphere as narrative.

Mushroom Monuments & Dune Cities

Fungal megastructures, ringed-planet towers, and a dense ink city in dunes, civilization as geology, geology as organism. It closes the set with a strong “atlas finale”: the built and the grown become indistinguishable.

Xenobiome Atlas (Rooted Machines)

A plate-family of organisms that look half botanical, half engineered: coral-root growths, skeletal spines, and soft-body structures. These scenes propose ecology as a hybrid technology, life that has learned to build like circuitry.