AI Creatures, Deep-Sea Mining, and the Western Sublime Collide in Miljohn Ruperto’s Cantor Arts Center Show
In Palo Alto, where billboards along the approach to Stanford pitch one AI product after another, artist Miljohn Ruperto is staging a quieter provocation: what if the very act of knowing the world is inseparable from damaging it?
On view at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center, Ruperto’s exhibition threads artificial intelligence, extractive industry, and art history into a single, uneasy atmosphere. One of the show’s anchors, “Fathoms (Tartarapelagic)” (2025–26), begins with a black screen. Slowly, a luminous, alien-bodied creature materializes — five legs, translucent antennae — then shifts into an isopod-like form with more articulated limbs. The figures are generated with AI, but they are not pure fantasy. They are modeled on species recently identified in the Pacific Ocean’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a deep-sea region that has become a focal point for mining.
The work’s premise carries a pointed contradiction. The CCZ is targeted for extraction of manganese, nickel, copper, and cobalt — minerals widely used in contemporary technology, including the infrastructure that makes AI possible. Ruperto’s AI “discoveries” thus arrive shadowed by the threat to the living organisms that inspired them.
Ruperto frames this tension as an ethical stance rather than a puzzle to be solved. “I think of it as a moral position,” he said, describing a present moment he sees as pushing “fractured individuation.” His counterproposal is to insist on interdependence: “I want to show our entanglement,” he added, before concluding, “It’s OK to be entangled.”
That insistence on entanglement extends beyond the ocean floor. Elsewhere in the exhibition, Ruperto presents a reanimation of a mile-high, two-day dust storm documented in a 1977 photograph taken by a Chevron employee — an image tied, in the artist’s framing, to the company’s extractive agricultural practices that helped produce the disaster. Another work takes the form of a book charting the positions of 123,663 stars around a planet believed to contain diamond cores, a detail that reads as both scientific curiosity and a speculative lure for investors. In the exhibition catalog, Ruperto distills the show’s skepticism into a single line: “Once you name something, it’s already over.”
The exhibition’s art-historical citations sharpen that critique. Ruperto includes five framed versions of German painter Caspar David Friedrich’s “Monk by the Sea” (1808–10), each one echoing the original’s solitary figure dwarfed by an ominous horizon. But the paintings are not presented as reverent homage. Ruperto’s versions were produced in a village in China known for manufacturing copies of European works, turning the Romantic sublime into a deliberately mediated, outsourced image.
Beneath those reproductions, seven CRT televisions play reenactments of a 1961 episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” in which a drunk college student is manipulated into believing he killed his best friend and buried him by the shore. The pairing — counterfeit sublime above, psychological coercion below — suggests a world in which images and narratives do not simply represent reality but actively shape what viewers think they know.
The show’s most immersive sequence unfolds inside a cloth tent, where Ruperto presents three versions of a Thomas Cole painting re-created using the computer graphics platform Unreal Engine. Visitors can put on Meta VR goggles and enter the landscape as if surveying it firsthand. The gesture is not neutral. Cole’s 19th-century vistas helped popularize an image of North America as empty, available, and destined for possession — paintings that functioned, in effect, as persuasive panoramas for settler imagination.
Ruperto uses that history to frame today’s scramble for a “next” frontier, digital or otherwise. Inside the VR environment, viewers move through a valley at dusk toward a campsite where the artist animates a 19th-century Christian sect known as the Millerites, who believed the world would end on October 22, 1844. The figures appear frozen in panic as they confront the fact that the apocalypse is not arriving.
The VR work, “What God Hath Wrought (Kairos),” forms the third installment of Ruperto’s ongoing series “The Great Disappointment” (2026–), commissioned by the Cantor. The project collapses time, presenting multiple versions of the same day — including scenarios in which the end does, in fact, occur. The first chapter, “Ultimate Days (Aion)” (2026), is currently on view at the Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco.
Across these works, Ruperto returns to a single pressure point: the human impulse to categorize the unknown into manageable containers — “science,” “medicine,” “art,” “technology” — and the violence that can follow from that impulse. At Cantor, the unknown is not romanticized as pure mystery. It is rendered as something luminous and endangered, copied and commodified, immersive and implicated — a reminder that the future we are building is already entangled with what it consumes.
