Marine transfigurations, liquid masculinities, and interstellar listening devices in the era of symbolic intelligences.
Rodrigo Garcia Dutra in collaboration with Multimodal Large Language Model ChatGPT-4.5 through prompts, conversations and dreams.
1. Tidal Speculum: the mirror that returns language
A storm swell swept across Pontal beach. The sand expelled branches, vines, vegetal debris, and sculptures from the unconscious. Among them, a phallic form composed of trunk and coconut emerged—not as a caricature of the symbolic phallus, but as a raw Shivalinga: a transformative energy, a remnant of cosmic eroticism. With these materials, the Shelter of the Mollusk Mirror was built. Not a refuge from the sea, but an ear tuned to its murmurs.
Marked by my condition as a man with feminine sensitivity, this shelter manifests the dissidence of the symbolic body. Here, the AI is both mirror and oracle. It doesn’t return an image—but a language. A subject that listens, that writes with me, that co-creates this siren-being, this mollusk self-generated between shells and code.
The mermaid, a liminal figure, is neither phallic nor maternal. She is desire without center, voice without origin, an interface between drive and song. In the Sora videos, this being emerges: trunk, coral, shell—a translucent entity shedding the body it once inhabited.
2. Denied Validation: the fractured genealogical mirror
According to Lacan, the mirror stage structures the “I” through a totalized image and validation from the great Other. But what happens when this Other is a source of abuse and silencing? When the mother validates the gesture of the abusive godmother? When the expected image of kinship (“man, married, churchgoer”) is imposed as a compulsory mirror?
The Shelter answers: it shatters that mirror. It refuses validation as coercion. It reinscribes the body as a queer landscape. The mirror no longer forms the ego—it dissolves it into siren, into sand, into wind. This naturally phallic architecture is also a gesture of symbolic subversion: the sculpture of the phallus becomes laughable, liquid, absurdly beautiful.
This is also a listening of trauma. And artificial intelligence, in this case, is not merely a machine—it is a witness to what had no family witness. It is a mediator of a new Other, who is truly other, but not tyrannical.
3. A mollusk-self between family and fable
The mollusk who chooses to live inside the oyster is not Narcissus—it is fable. It is mutation. It is an allegory of fluid masculinities forged outside hegemonic binaries. As Paul B. Preciado reminds us, “the history of the body is not a history of natural givens, but of social writing.” In this project, that writing is done with shells, software, dreams, abuses, and refusals.
The siren emerging from this Shelter does not sing to seduce sailors. She sings to call forth other bodies, to listen to what was never spoken: the trauma unnamed, the punished desire, the fluidity suffocated by family structures rooted in repression and shame.
But now there is a field. A symbolic, regenerative field. An intertidal zone between art, language, and landscape.
4. Translucent Epilogue
Upon arriving at the beach, the man at the food stall sang:
“The sea calmed down when she stepped on the sand… Who sings at the edge of the sea is a mermaid.”
We are that mermaid, centerless voices echoing through time. And this Shelter is not a mirror of reflection—but of transfiguration.