Baroque Consumer Vanitas

2025 November #006. This investigation began with a question about what neural networks hallucinate into historical darkness, but discovered something more urgent: the collision between aesthetic traditions that demanded sustained attention and the objects that now fragment it. I was pursuing computational pareidolia when the work revealed its actual subject, the sacred and profane meeting in the void where our attention economy operates.

The hypothesis about machine vision dreaming into Renaissance shadow became a method for examining how we consume culture now. By rendering contemporary ephe