Universal Venus

I have long been fascinated by symbols of femininity and the earliest representations of the human body. Prehistoric Venus figurines, created more than 20,000 years ago, are among the first artistic images of humankind: they embody fertility, nature, and the life force itself.

With Universal Venus, I aim to reframe these primordial figures in the age of artificial intelligence. In response to Nancy Burson’s Goddess (Mary, Quan Yin & Isis), which merged the faces of multiple spiritual figures to create a universal image of the sacred, I bring together the bodies of prehistoric Venuses from across cultures and geographies to generate a universal Venus.

As a foundation for this work, I created a database of Venus figurines from across the globe. Each entry is carefully documented with details such as dimensions, materials, photographs, and discovery sites, bringing together fragments of prehistory into a single archive.

From this database, I have trained an AI to generate new, imagined Venuses. The algorithm, informed by the gathered data, merges or reinterprets figurines, assigning them speculative materials, textures, and even fictive contexts of discovery. These digital composites are not ends in themselves, but become models for sculpture, rematerialized in clay or stoneware. In this way, I return Burson’s digital exploration into the physical realm, translating AI’s speculative forms into tangible objects.

The works oscillate between the archaic and the contemporary. Born from the memory of the first human images, yet shaped by today’s technological tools. Ultimately, Universal Venus explores how ancestral archetypes can be reborn through contemporary means, and how the universal can emerge from diversity, hybridity, and reinvention.

FEMGEN

Facetune Portraits

In Universal Beauty, Gretchen Andrew transforms the spectacle of the Miss Universe competition into a digital video work that exposes the homogenizing force of AI-driven beauty standards. Across the screen, contestants from 9 different countries gradually morph into the same nose, lips, and face—an algorithmic convergence where individuality disappears. What begins as a celebration of global diversity collapses into uniformity, revealing how a single AI vision of beauty overwrites cultural and personal distinctions.

Unlike the seamless, invisible edits of social media filters, Universal Beauty makes the process visible. The morphing is imperfect, reminding us of the distortion, erasure, and quiet violence hidden within the pursuit of digital “perfection.”

The video becomes a double portrait: the women as they are, and the women as AI insists they should be. The tension lies in the slippage between the two, as faces stretch and collapse into sameness. Where once there was difference, now only conformity remains.

Universal Beauty reveals not only the absurdity of a monocultural standard of beauty but also the scars it leaves, psychological, cultural, and visual. It confronts our collective desire not simply to be beautiful, but to be made acceptable by both peers and algorithms.

Body Without Presence #1

This work is inspired by the approach seen in Brazilian artist Analivia Cordeiro’s Computer Dance series, where the human figure is reduced to symbols, acquiring a mechanical impression while merging seamlessly with its surrounding scene.

In Japan, the body has long been a vessel of meaning. For example, the summer Bon Odori dance carries a ritualistic role of sending off ancestral spirits. Its choreography emphasizes the movement of the feet over the hands, embodying the symbolic act of “treading the earth to pacify the spirits.” Other gestures, such as “reaping rice,” “scooping water,” or “raising lanterns,” continue to preserve the symbolic language of the body, rooted in agriculture and memorial rites.

In this work, such meaningful gestures are reinterpreted as “signs,” following Cordeiro’s perspective. They are then connected with contemporary AI technologies to visualize the transformation and instability of these signs. Using images of Japanese dances such as Awa Odori, Yosakoi, and Bon Odori, I trained AI models in Fluxgym and generated and transformed bodies with ComfyUI (a node-based AI tool). The resulting images betray their original structures of meaning, emerging instead as distorted bodily signs. On TouchDesigner (a node-based visual coding software), these images are further warped over time, dancers dissolve into a single image, ultimately shifting into mechanical existences devoid of meaning.

What emerges is an “Body Without Presence,” a mechanical presence in which the human figure has disappeared. It is at once a phantom generated by algorithms and an object upon which we project culture and emotion.

Within this process, the artist’s role lies in “decision-making” and “poetic leaps.” By welcoming AI not merely as a tool but as an “other” engaged in the creation of meaning, a co-choreography becomes possible. Distorted signs, transformed bodies, the disappearance of meaning, what new forms of poetry might arise within them? And in what ways might they return to our bodies and imagination?

Body Without Presence #2

Body Without Presence #3

Body Without Presence #4

Body Without Presence #5

Body Without Presence #6

Body Without Presence #7

Body Without Presence #8

Body Without Presence #9

DoomScroll #1

These images are a visual representation of ‘doom-scrolling’, of what happens when wasted time is turned into a physical scroll of time.
‘DoomScroll’ was created using a process called slit-scan, a photographic method for visualising the passing of time across an image. Historically the film strip would be pulled through a special camera which instead of exposing a full image only exposes a thin slit of light. The film is then fed smoothly through the camera exposing the film to whatever action happens through that slit. One example it was historically used for was to capture horses passing a finishing line and to determine the winner. For this work I've written code to extract rows of pixels from video footage to modernise this method of recording time across a photograph.
To create the work I performed an endurance challenge. I filmed myself doom-scrolling for 3 hours straight until my phone ran out of charge. Images and faces no longer meant anything and as my back started to ache I began seeing only shapeless forms and colours. These recordings are then turned into long photographic scrolls displaying the passage of time. The resulting series of scrolls visualise small chunks of time from this larger performance.
Queer time and the fuzzy representations of time play a key part in the work. Whether that be the rendering of time through slit scan, the strange sense of losing time when enacting the doomscrolling performance or the 7 months it took to render the video on my outdated GPU computer.
The resulting abstracted, generative drawings with light convert time wasted on Instagram into something approaching the sublime. The appropriated data passing across the screen are social media posts which people have chosen to publicly share. Early utopian computer artists used code to make drawing machines. ‘DoomScroll’ advances this process with results mediated through an increasingly corrosive engagement with social media and my iPhone.

DoomScroll #2

DoomScroll #3

DoomScroll #4

DoomScroll #5

Now in its fourth edition, FEMGEN Paris brings together female-identifying and non-binary artists shaping the future of generative art. Curated by Micol Apruzzese and Alex Estorick since 2022, the exhibition pairs four emerging artists with pioneers from the Le Random collection, fostering intergenerational dialogue through code and curated conversation.

Through its physical installation at Artverse in Paris and online at Fellowship, FEMGEN traces new genealogies of media, challenging universal ideals of beauty and femininity that encode Western image culture. Set alongside an array of historic works by Nancy Burson, Analivia Cordeiro, Copper Giloth, and Vera Molnar, new series by contemporary artists Gretchen Andrew, Hermine Bourdin, Saeko Ehara, and Jake Elwes explore the ways identity is manufactured and performed in a posthuman age.

Group Show

FEMGEN

Overview

“Challenging traditional ideals of beauty and femininity, FEMGEN examines how identity is coded, manufactured, and performed in a posthuman era.“

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