This piece from this month’s Art in America – “The week in culture” section
By Simon Wu
In a Show at Stanford, Miljohn Ruperto Trolls the Death Drive of AI Guys
As I stood in front of a black screen, a luminous alien creature with five legs and translucent antennae appeared. After a minute, it morphed into an isopod with larger, more articulated limbs. Fathoms (Tartarapelagic), 2025–26, by Miljohn Ruperto, uses AI to generate otherworldly creatures like these, all based on species recently discovered in the Pacific Ocean’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ). But there’s a dark irony: the extensive mining of manganese, nickel, copper, and cobalt in the CCZ—minerals essential for AI technology—have endangered the lives of the actual species.
Nearly every billboard on the road into Palo Alto—where Ruperto’s work is on view at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center—advertises a different AI tool. There, Ruperto suggests that to know is partly to destroy.
“I think of it as a moral position,” Ruperto said, when I asked him about this bind. “The current moment is directing us towards fractured individuation, and I want to show our entanglement, “ he explained—adding, with a smile, “It’s OK to be entangled.”
He’s also showing a reanimation of a mile-high, two-day dust storm captured in a 1977 photograph by a Chevron employee, whose company’s extractive agricultural practices partly caused the disaster. Another work, a book, maps the locations of 123,663 stars around a planet thought to contain diamond cores—intriguing to scientists and shareholders alike. “Once you name something,” Ruperto says in the catalog, “it’s already over.”
Standing in the show, I felt as if I were facing an enormous, swirling mass of darkness and stars—and trying to contain it all in tiny cups labeled “science,” “medicine,” “art,” or “technology.” This is how we cope with the unknown: we shape it in our image so we can control it. Ruperto’s five framed renditions of Caspar David Friedrich’sMonk by the Sea (1808–10) show that famous figure nearly swallowed by the horizon of an encroaching storm. Here Ruperto presents a counterfeit Western sublime: his canvases were produced in a village in China famous for making copies of European paintings. Below the reproductions, seven CRT TV’s play re-enactments of a 1961 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents in which a drunk college student is led to believe that he killed his best friend and buried him at the shore. We are left searching for a salvation that may not exist.
In the show, a cloth tent features three versions of a Thomas Cole painting that Ruperto re-created using the computer graphics software Unreal Engine. At the center of the tent, visitors can slip on a pair of Meta VR goggles, as if surveying the land themselves. I got in line. Cole’s paintings were meant to present North America as empty and ripe for the taking, essentially, immersive advertisements to prompt settlers to imagine themselves there. Ruperto brilliantly situates our moment’s power grab for the next digital frontier within a longer history of colonial conquest.
When it was my turn, the attendant sanitized the goggles and I adjusted them over my head. For a minute, it was dark. Immersed inside the Cole painting, I wandered down the valley at dusk, arriving at the campsite, where Ruperto brought to life a 19th-century Christian sect that believed the world would end on October 22, 1844. The Millerites, as they were known, began to appear around me frozen in various states of panic while they realized that the world was not going to end.
That work, What God Hath Wrought (Kairos), is the third part of Ruperto’s “The Great Disappointment” series (2026–), commissioned by the Cantor. These works collapse time and present multiple versions of the same day: in some versions the apocalypse does occur.
Part one of this series, Ultimate Days (Aion), 2026, is currently on view at the Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco. There, with the help of Stanford physics professor Hideo Mabuchi, Ruperto has simulated a camera obscura that runs a 24-hour generative stream of the Millerites’ judgment day. Nothing much happens, but the work is pensive and monumental, an enormous orb waiting for the world to end.
Accompanying this work at the Minnesota Street Project is a new film called The New Society, an AI-generated animation about a society where children are raised in a simulation of total egalitarianism. After a certain age, the children are sent to establish the new world, while everyone else has to “remain in the world that we have broken.” It’s a dystopian thriller: a young child escapes her confines at a roadside diner and is met with a hateful diatribe against this promise of her egalitarian society. Then she hears a more hopeful monologue from a zealot who worked on The New Society. Tongues morph into lips, and the language of the monologue did not sync with the voices. I kept waiting for some critical turn—for the film to address the means of its making, or the dark, medium-specific irony that pervaded much of Ruperto’s other work.
At the opening, Ruperto told me he was interested in the myth of Aristophanes—in the idea that we had all been split from our perfect halves, left to search for completion. He said that AI would provide us with this perfect other half, but that getting what you want would not necessarily provide meaning. Perhaps this new film did just that, portraying a kind of perfect egalitarian society that so many yearn for, but also showing us that getting what we want without real process feels hollow, uncanny, artificial.
As I passed the AI billboards again heading back to the airport, I kept picturing visitors in Meta headsets at the Cantor. They were as much a part of the exhibition as the Thomas Cole images: ciphers for our current moment, minds enraptured by vision, blind to the room around them.
Miljohn Ruperto: What God Hath Wrought (Kairos) from the series “The Great Disappointment,” 2026–.
By Simon Wu