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The Pyramid of Gaius Cestius, from Vedute di Roma (Roman Views) Giovanni Battista Piranesi Italian ca. 1756 It may seem counterintuitive to look for answers about using artificial intelligence to recreate Jesus in Ancient Rome's ruins. However, Rome's history tells us something deeply meaningful about how humanity adapts, incorporates, and remixes other cultures' imagery. My central research focuses on how ancient Rome, through conquest and encounter, absorbed foreign cults,

The Imago Dei, the image of God, is understood as the divine reflection of creation within the individual human person. And yet, humans have crafted external representations of Vestigia Dei. These “traces of God” extend that inner essence outward into the physical world. They are similar, but with varying inclinations. The Imago Dei is what humanity bears within it, and the Vestigia Dei is the image humans outwardly make. Humanity has projected the Vestigia Dei into the world

"Real Violence" at the Whitney (NYC) I rubbed against the metal railing until it shone, trying to focus on the table and not my clothes. “I should have bought a suit,” I thought to myself as I quickly checked one of the IR beacons and rearranged the Oculus Virtual Reality headsets. “You should have packed a suit, dammit.” The thought kept returning, tight and stubborn, as the first wave of art world notables poured into the gallery space. Somewhere to my left a New Yorker mag

March 22, 2020. Vancouver, British Columbia. The SkyTrain should have been packed. At seven in the morning on a weekday, downtown-bound cars are normally shoulder-to-shoulder; commuters are braced against each other, headphones in, eyes down. Instead, I was nearly alone. The silence was not pleasant at all. It was the kind that makes you aware of every breath behind a mask. COVID had arrived. Not just speculation, but fact. Essential workers were still needed, and I was one o

Across every society anthropology has recorded, those humans examined had a curious need to search for something beyond their senses. Donald Brown, an anthropologist, counts this belief in the supernatural sense among what he calls “human universals” or traits with no known exception within humanity. Brown identifies what he frames as “UP,” or “the universal people [who] have religious or supernatural beliefs in that they believe in something beyond the visible and palpable.”