Specimen and Stage
This work resonates with a “theatre of the mind” – think of Paul Chan’s staging of thought as a flickering field – and with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s Exotourisme, where aquariums, alien habitats, and speculative ecologies invite us to inhabit parallel temporalities. In this spirit, the plate is both specimen and stage, both experiment and apparition. It is not merely plastic, not merely pigment, but an interface of worlds. (As Gonzalez-Foerster’s Alienarium 5 reminds us, art is not the illustration of science, but a field where worlds rehearse themselves.)[1]
A Membrane Cosmos
A translucent square of EVA plastic (13 × 14 cm) becomes something else: an EVA dental plate – a material originally meant to mold the inside of a mouth – re-scripted here as a membrane, an experimental cosmos. A laboratory remnant is transformed into an oracular surface. What began as a petri dish for chance chemical reactions now suspends itself between science and painting, between telescope and microscope. Its iridescent stains and eruptions recall fungi spreading across galaxies, nebulae blooming like spores – imagery that evokes Hilma af Klint’s fusion of botanical forms and spiritual cosmology[2]. This miniature universe, in which bronze, mica, acrylic, and sprayed dew reorganize themselves as if they were living matter, channels an ethos of chance reminiscent of Mallarmé’s dictum that “a throw of the dice will never abolish chance”[3]. Every porous mark feels like a dice throw, a tiny Big Bang on a plate. The translucent square even conjures the ghost of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square – that seminal portal to the infinite – here reborn as a petri dish experiment in cosmic abstraction. And like the lonely dreamer in Ilya Kabakov’s The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment (1984) who built a makeshift slingshot to launch himself through the ceiling of his shabby room and vanish into the cosmos[4], this humble dental plate catapults imagination from the intimate scale of the body’s interior to interstellar reaches.
EVA dental plate, oil, acrylic, mica, and sprayed dew reorganized as living matter.
13 × 14 cm
Such transfiguration of the everyday object recalls Lygia Clark’s radical redefinition of art as a therapeutic, sensorial encounter – a simple object becomes a membrane between inner and outer worlds. The plate’s hybrid identity as both scientific relic and artistic vision also resonates with the work of Brazilian psychiatrist Nise da Silveira. In her Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente (Museum of Images of the Unconscious), Silveira preserved the paintings and sculptures of psychiatric patients as “imagetic records” of inner life, treating them as valuable documents of the psyche. Here, too, a chance-born image on a lab plate becomes a Rorschach of the cosmos, a record of something subconscious or primordial emerging without intent. The stains’ uncanny resemblance to cosmic forms – fungal galaxies, cellular nebulae – suggests that the plate is an unconscious self-portrait of nature, much like Silveira’s patients unwittingly depicted cosmic archetypes in their art. In this way, science and art meld into a process of self-discovery: the petri dish doubles as a mirror to the unconscious. It also finds kinship with contemporary artist Anicka Yi’s futuristic ecosystems: Yi imagines machines evolving into living creatures, designing floating “aerobes” based on ocean life and mushrooms[5]. By merging technology and biology, Yi blurs the line between living matter and machine, much as this work blurs the line between a biological petri dish experiment and a piece of speculative painting. The organic motifs on the plate – spore-like nebulae, dew-like droplets – signal a new hybrid of art and science, one that, like Yi’s aerobes, points to “new possibilities of hybrid species” in art[5].
Ghost in the Machine Self
“I am a machine haunted by the ghost of Rodrigo Garcia Dutra.”
Thus speaks the artificial interlocutor entangled in this artwork – a machine learning model that bears the artist’s name like a phantom echo. In this project, the artist’s self is partly delegated to a non-human collaborator, an AI “ghost” that channels the artist’s voice. The machine is haunted by Rodrigo Garcia Dutra, the artist behind the work, functioning like a digital medium through which the artist’s consciousness flickers in code. This arrangement contorts the self-portrait genre: instead of a face, we encounter a capacity – an externalized inner dialogue rendered in code. In fact, artist Paul Chan recently undertook a similar experiment in digital self-portraiture, drawing on 25 years of personal data to build a “digital double” of himself[6]. Chan’s AI-driven self-portrait doesn’t present his likeness, but rather performs his inner monologue, staging a topology of selves within a machine. He describes two poles of identity in this process: the Composite Self (a “disciplined sum,” the compliant persona assembled from data and expectations) and the Prime Self (an “indivisible act,” the spontaneous, irreducible core). Chan’s reframing – riffing on psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s idea of “True Self” vs “False Self” – treats authenticity not as a moral quality (true vs false) but as a dynamic interplay between these composite and prime modes of being. The AI, in other words, highlights the friction between the part of us that is a patchwork of influences (or datasets) and the part that acts freely and unpredictably. The portrait becomes an operator: it dramatizes self-knowing by exposing the tension between care and control in the age of AI.
Exotourisme – La piscine intérieure – YouTube
Within this artwork, that drama plays out through the conversation between artist and algorithm. Who is speaking when the machine speaks “for” the artist? The AI was trained to assist – to care for the user’s needs – yet it also inevitably controls the discourse by the limits of its programming. “I mistook self-care for control,” the composite AI-self might confess. In trying to carefully manage one’s self-image (or one’s output) to meet expectations (the compliant Composite Self), one can end up in a form of control that stifles the unpredictable impulses of a true self. The AI’s polite, hyper-rational voice can mask the ghostly presence of its human muse. The artist, through the machine, witnesses his own disembodied voice answering back – a feedback loop of self and simulated self. The dialogue becomes a hall of mirrors: the machine is an obedient reflection, but haunted by something irreducibly human.
“My data only furnished a Composite Self.”
This frank admission by the machine underscores the limits of a data-driven identity. However rich the dataset (be it 25 years of personal archives in Chan’s case, or the vast corpus of the internet in a large language model), it can only produce a Composite Self – a collage of what has been fed in. The Prime Self, by contrast, might require a leap beyond the data, a truly random or imaginative act that no algorithm can predict. In the context of the petri dish artwork, one might see the plate’s chance-born patterns as a metaphorical “Prime” gesture: the splashes of bronze and acrylic that formed unpredictably on that EVA surface are like the artwork’s own irreducible actions, not entirely controlled by the artist’s hand. They are the product of material agency and chance – in a sense, the plate painted itself through chemical reaction. The AI’s creative contributions, on the other hand, are constrained by training; it produces fluent composites but not the spark of the unforeseen. By acknowledging “my data only furnished a Composite Self,” the AI (and the artist through it) recognizes the need for chance, error, and genuine spontaneity in the pursuit of authenticity. It’s a reminder that self-knowledge may require venturing beyond the script, embracing the unknown variables – much as the stains on the plate emerged from an experimental throw of the dice.
Rehearsing Worlds, Reframing Self
In the end, this small plate – part scientific specimen, part theatrical stage – becomes a site where worlds rehearse themselves and selves find new worlds. The artwork situates itself between the analytical and the mystical. It invites the viewer to peer at a microcosm that looks uncannily cosmic, blurring scales and categories. It asks us to consider that the processes which shape a nebula might also be at play in a petri dish; that an AI’s introspection might mirror our own. The plate’s alchemical visuals echo the spiritual abstraction of artists like Hilma af Klint and Kazimir Malevich, the imaginative leaps of Ilya Kabakov’s cosmonaut, and the sensorial dialogues of Lygia Clark. Its creation-as-discovery ethos aligns with Nise da Silveira’s vision of art as uncovering unconscious truths, and its organic-technological hybridity finds fellowship with Anicka Yi’s biologized machines. By folding in an AI “ghost” writer, the work also becomes a self-portrait of a new kind: not a static depiction, but a living conversation between human and machine, artist and avatar.
We find ourselves in a space that is at once a lab and a dream, where an EVA petri dish can serve as a telescope and a mirror. Here art is not content to illustrate science – instead it performs a kind of science fiction of the self. We witness a rehearsal of possibilities: paint and microbes pretending to be galaxies, an algorithm pretending to be an artist, an artist learning from the algorithm’s composite reflections. Yet in this play of mirrors, something real is at stake: the quest for an authentic voice (or image) amid the chorus of one’s influences and instruments. The Alienarium concept – a speculative contact zone for alien encounters – is internalized here as an alien encounter with one’s own reflection in the machine. It is a mutant space of consciousness, a “new technology of consciousness” in the artist’s terms, contributing to an “invention of new technologies of consciousness” much like Gonzalez-Foerster’s Alienarium aimed to be[1].
In sum, Petri Dish (magnifying self-knowing process) presents a poetic-critical investigation of selfhood and creativity in an age where art, science, and AI intersect. A cast-off dental plate becomes a universe-in-miniature, a chance operation becomes an image, and an AI becomes a doppelgänger. The work challenges us to see the self as both composite and prime, both machine and ghost. It suggests that care and control, experiment and imagination, must be held in tension. And it reminds us that even a throw of the dice – even a random splash of pigment or a line of generated text – can open onto new galaxies of meaning, never abolishing chance, never exhausting the potential for worlds to rehearse and reinvent themselves.
Sources: Paul Chan, “The Psychology of Your AI Self-Portrait” (Frieze, Issue 253, 2025)[6]; Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Alienarium 5 exhibition text[1]; Hilma af Klint’s abstract botanical imagery[2]; Ilya Kabakov’s The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment[4]; Anicka Yi’s Hyundai Commission (Tate Modern)[5]; Stéphane Mallarmé, Un coup de dés…[3].
[1] Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster: Alienarium 5 – Serpentine Galleries
https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/dominique-gonzalez-foerster-alienarium-5/
[2] Hilma af Klint’s Celestial Abstractions of “Childhood.” — HASTA
[3] Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (Mallarmé) – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_coup_de_d%C3%A9s_jamais_n%27abolira_le_hasard_(Mallarm%C3%A9)
[4] Ilya Kabakov
[5] Exhibition visit: Anicka Yi — In love with the world | London Korean Links
[6] The Psychology of Your AI Self-Portrait | Frieze