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Building the Tesseract: The Archive Learns to Search, See, and Talk Back

Sharing this with the NET-ART and CUNY Commons community because, underneath the build, it is a teaching question: what becomes possible when you can point AI at your own work, or a whole course, and search it, see it, and talk back to it, locally and for free? There is a section below written specifically for teachers. Originally published at ryanseslow.com.

 

Twenty years of my scattered work, pulled into one living archive that talks back, holds a huge portion of my creative life, opens a door for machines, and now shows you its face. A field report, with the unflattering parts included..

Yes, this is unapologetically long.. good thing our attention spans are ready for it!

This started with a simple, slightly uncomfortable question:

What is hacking, really, and could I hack myself?

Not in the “Hollywood” sense. In the original sense: to understand a system well enough to make it do something it was not expected to do. I wanted to point that lens at the one system I have the most access to and the least honest view of, my own patterns. So I asked an AI working session to do something most of us never let anything do: read my actual behavior off my own machine. Not the story I tell about myself, but the evidence. The files. The time-stamps. The folders and files that I start and abandon. The things I save and never reopen..

What came back changed how I see my own work, and over a handful of sessions it turned into something I had wanted for twenty years and never finished. This post is the whole story, start to finish. If you have been following along, you already know the early chapters: I let an AI read my entire twenty-year WordPress archive and asked what would happen. This is where it lands. The archive learned to talk back, then it went public, then it opened a door for machines, and just now it opened its eyes.

Here is the twist I did not expect: every version that worked was the one I made smaller. The early builds were ambitious and intricate. The versions that shipped are deliberately minimal, the standard library, one database file, a couple of small local models. The distillation was the breakthrough.

I stopped elaborating and started finishing..

Hacking Myself: The Loop I Could Not See

I let the session look at the shape of my digital life: my Desktop, my 50GB+ iCloud archive, my Google Drive, my live website. Not to read my private thoughts, to read the patterns. The structure. The geology.

The finding was humbling and precise. Across every archive, the same loop repeated at every scale:

A vision ignites, I erupt in prolific output, I get the high of the birth, the next idea pulls me away, the work is left where it landed, it quietly entombs, and months later the same idea is reborn under a new name..

I am, it turns out, addicted to genesis creation and allergic to maintenance. I start brilliantly and rarely return. My iCloud held a heroic consolidation of my career, built between 2015 and 2018, then abandoned and never reopened. My Desktop held twenty live project threads in ten weeks, nothing filed. And the same core idea, an AI trained on my own art and writing, had been born three separate times under three different names, each one starting over from zero. That is seriously funny!

The missing spot was not disorganization. It was that nothing I made was ever allowed to compound, because compounding requires returning, and returning never gave me the hit that starting did.

The Correction: “No Content Available”

Here is where it got sharp. The session found that I had, years ago, (2024 in AI time is like 10 tears ago in todays time) haha, already started building the AI-trained-on-me dataset. I had even exported my entire website into per-year training files. For a moment it looked like the project was most of the way done.

Then we actually opened the files. And almost every single record said the same thing:

{"prompt": "Describe the artwork titled 'DSC06448' created in 2009.",
 "completion": "No content available."}

The training data for the AI version of me was empty. The pipeline had pulled image filenames, DSC06448, but never captured a word of my actual writing. I had built the exciting structure of the idea, run it once, gotten back rows that literally read “No content available,” and walked away before the unglamorous extraction work.

I want to sit with how perfect that is. The empty file was the whole diagnosis in plain text. The content is available. It is all over my live site. I just stopped before capturing it. Genesis got done. Maintenance did not. Even my self-portrait-as-AI had abandoned itself at the hard part.

So we changed the plan: stop trying to out-discipline the loop, and build a layer that does the maintenance automatically, routing every future idea into one home instead of letting it spawn a fourth.

(One unglamorous aside, because it belongs to the same lesson: the self-audit also turned up live API keys sitting in plaintext inside old scripts, the kind of thing that can quietly run up a bill or worse. We found them, I revoked them, and rewrote those files to read their keys from the environment. The cost of never returning to your old work is that things rot there. Going back is not glamorous. It is also where safety, and value, actually live.)

Chapter One: The Archive Learns to Talk Back

The fix has a deliberately boring shape, because boring is what compounds. I call it RyanSeslow OS, a single, local home for my body of work, in three layers:

  • Ingest, pull my real content from where it actually lives.
  • Spine, store it once, in one place, in a form I can search and grow.
  • Aremes, a conversational layer that answers questions using only my own writing, in my own voice, with citations.

Then we built it, end to end, in a single session. It read my website, 1,160 posts and pages, roughly 357,000 words spanning 2008 to 2026, with more than 12,000 images linked, into a single catalog. It turned all of that into a local semantic index. And then I asked it a question I had never directly answered anywhere:

How can artists use AI to expand their creative practice without losing themselves?

Aremes answered in my voice, drawing on essays I wrote in 2012 and 2013, citing each one with a link, and honestly noting that I had never addressed the question head-on rather than inventing an answer. That honesty is the system working correctly. It is grounded in me, and only me.

For the first time in this entire twenty-year pattern, the AI-trained-on-me idea shipped, held real content, answered questions, and grows when I publish. The loop broke.

The most surprising thing about it is how small and free it is. It runs entirely on a laptop. No API key, no subscription, no cloud bill, nothing anyone can revoke. Python 3 and its standard library only. My own WordPress content via its built-in REST API. One SQLite file. Two small local models through Ollama: nomic-embed-text for the meaning index and llama3.2:3b for grounded answers. Retrieval is plain cosine similarity in pure Python; with about 1,100 documents, brute force is instant.

(The full build is in the appendix at the end of this post, so you can make your own!)

Chapter Two: The Archive Goes Public

The obvious next step was to drop the AI chat onto my website so anyone could ask it questions. I did the opposite, on purpose.

Here is why. The local model is small enough to run on a 2019 laptop, which is wonderful, but it means that every so often, even grounded in my real writing, it will invent a quote and attribute it to me. On my own machine, with a verification layer that flags fabrications, that is manageable. On a public website, it is unacceptable. A tool that occasionally puts words in my mouth, in front of strangers, is worse than no tool at all.

So the public version is search, not chat. It does not generate answers. It does not summarize. It does not imitate my voice. It takes your words, finds the most relevant passages from my actual posts, and links you straight to the originals. Zero hallucination, because there is no generation happening at all. Every result is really me. And it is built the way the whole project is built, as a single static page on my own shared hosting: no server to babysit, no AI service metering me, nothing a company can switch off.

You can use it right now: ryanseslow.com/search/

Then I gave it a big portion of my creative life, not just my blog. For two decades my work has lived in different places: long-form on the blog, but also thousands of posts on Tumblr, Instagram, more than 1,500 animated GIFs and stickers on Giphy. None of them talked to each other. None of them were searchable as one thing.

And this is where it got funny, and very me. It turned out I had already “prepared” each of these. Years ago I had made caption files, export folders, an archive system for every platform. I felt organized. Then we actually opened them:

  • My Giphy captions file, 1,593 rows, where every single caption was an error message. The captioning script had broken and saved the errors as the captions.
  • My Tumblr “full archive” was entirely placeholder text: “Caption for Ryan Seslow artwork N, generated from AI analysis.” Stubs. No real content.
  • My Instagram archive, a beautiful folder structure I had named “The Memory Tree,” had a captioned-exports folder that was completely empty.

The same thing, again. I built the elaborate structure and never filled it. So this time we finished it, going to the living sources instead of the abandoned exports: my real Tumblr posts pulled directly and filtered down to only my own work, my real Instagram captions from the official export, the real titles and dates for all of my Giphy work. One search across everything I have made, blending platforms that never knew about each other. Search “sign language graffiti” and you get my Tumblr hand-style posts, my Instagram public-space interventions, a sign-language sticker from Giphy, and my long-form essays on art in public space, side by side.

Chapter Three: A Front Door For The Machines

The search box was built for human eyes. But the next thing to visit your website is not going to be a person. It is going to be an agent.

More and more, the way people find and buy things runs through an AI acting on their behalf. You tell it what you want, and it goes out, reads sites, compares, and sometimes completes the purchase, all without you opening a tab. My website was welcoming to a person and almost invisible to software. An AI that showed up at ryanseslow.com had no clean way to know what I make, what is for sale, what it costs, or how to license it. My twenty years of work might as well not have existed to it.

So I gave my archive a front door that machines can read. There is an emerging set of quiet standards for exactly this: small files you place on your site, written for machines rather than people. One is llms.txt, a plain-language summary an AI can read to understand who you are and what you offer. Others live in a .well-known folder and describe your catalog and capabilities in a structured way agents already know how to parse. A sign, written in a language only machines speak, hung on the front of the building.

And, very on brand for this series, when I went to check it, the door was broken. The file an agent looks for first was returning “not found.” I had built the doorway and never confirmed anyone could walk through it. We found the bug, fixed it, and tested it the way an actual agent would. Now when an AI arrives, the door opens: it can read a clean description of my practice, pull a machine-readable catalog, and search all twenty years through a single endpoint.

Built into the same surface is a way for an agent to ask a price for a piece and pay for it, in stablecoin, on its own, with no invoice and no checkout page. I am calling this layer AREMES, and the point is simple: my work should be able to be found and licensed by a machine at three in the morning while I am asleep. I am not turning my art into a vending machine, and I am not replacing the human relationships that matter most. I am making sure that when the buyer is an agent, and increasingly it will be, the door is open instead of closed and invisible.

Reading My Art Off The Chain

Here is the part I am also excited about.. because it taught me something. A chunk of my digital art work over the last several years lives on-chain, as 1/1 art on SuperRare. I wanted all of it in the archive. So I asked the platform’s own tools for my catalog, and they could only cleanly hand me the works currently for sale, sixteen of them. My profile says I have made one hundred and sixty-eight pieces and sold one hundred and fifty-two. The convenient view of my own catalog was mostly the unsold remainder.

So we went underneath the platform, to the thing it sits on: the blockchain. Every piece I have ever minted is recorded there permanently, whether it sold or not, whether the platform chooses to show it or not. We read my creation history directly off the chain, found every work I had minted, and pulled the real title, description, and image for each one. One hundred and fifty-eight came back complete. Read-only, no fees, nothing that could be revoked.

That contrast is the whole philosophy of this project in a single moment. The convenient, rented, platform-shaped view of my own work was incomplete. The permanent, owned, underlying record was whole. (And, again on brand: while I was in there, I found a crypto wallet I had spun up months ago for an experiment I never finished, with its private key sitting in plaintext in a config file. Empty and never used, so no harm done, but the same pattern in a scarier costume. I closed that loop too. The exciting new thing always arrives with new housekeeping.)

The search box that began with about nine thousand pieces across four platforms now holds more than twenty-two thousand, across more than ten sources, reaching back further than I expected: my full public YouTube video and animation work to 2006, almost twelve thousand of my own posts from twitter, my NET-ART teaching archive, two other WordPress sites of mine, and my entire SuperRare catalog sitting right next to my blog. One search, one body of work, twenty years and then some, in one place I own.

Chapter Four: The Archive Opens Its Eyes

Until now, everything I have described answers in words. You search, and you get titles and passages and links. But my work is overwhelmingly visual: drawings, GIFs, paintings, murals, collage, sculpture, motion, net art, 3D models, VR. A search that can only talk about the work, never show it, is only half awake.

So in the last day I gave the search eyes. Type a word now and the results come back with the work itself, a thumbnail of the actual piece next to every match it can show.

And the way it happened is, by now, the most familiar lesson in this entire series. I assumed I would have to go re-collect all those images. Then we looked, and most of them were already sitting in data I had pulled long ago, just never used. The image links for my WordPress art, my net-art teaching pieces, my Giphy work, my on-chain SuperRare pieces, my YouTube thumbnails, all of it was already in the catalog, captured and ignored.

My Twitter archive was the sharpest version of it. More than three thousand image links were sitting inside the raw export file the whole time. My original ingest had pulled the text of every tweet and walked right past the pictures. The images were never missing. They were never extracted. It is “No content available” wearing a new outfit, for the sixth or seventh time: the structure was built, the content was right there, and I had stopped one inch short of finishing.

This time the inch got walked. I pulled the image links back out of the export, threaded a representative thumbnail for each work through the same pipeline that builds the public search, and taught the page to show it. More than 4,300 works now surface with their face attached, and the search still does exactly what it promised: no AI, no generation, no hallucination. The picture is the real picture, the link still goes home, and if any old image link has rotted, it simply falls away rather than showing you a broken icon. The eyes did not cost the honesty.

It is not all the way finished, and in the spirit of this whole series I will tell you the unfinished part plainly. Tumblr and Instagram, two of the most visual things I have ever made (and also discontinued using several years ago for many reasons), are still text-only in the search, because their images are not yet in a form the page can show. Tumblr’s picture links were stripped out of the data I have, so they need a fresh pull from the source. Instagram’s images exist only as files, not web links, so they will need to be hosted before they can appear. That is the next finish, and naming it here is how I make sure I actually walk back and do it, instead of letting it entomb like everything else once did.

What This Means For You

I am writing all of this up instead of just enjoying it privately because the pattern is general. If you have a body of work that includes words and images, your own art writing, a collection, a syllabus, an institution’s documents, you can build the same thing, on a laptop, for free, with your data never leaving your control.

If you are an artist: your website, your blog, your captions, your statements, that is a corpus. Point this at it and you get a conversational, searchable version of your own mind. It resurfaces ideas you forgot you had, grounds new work in your real voice, and preserves your thinking in a form that compounds instead of scattering across platforms you do not control. Most importantly, it keeps your voice yours. The model only speaks from your words.

If you are an archive or a collection: ingest your catalog and you get a semantic discovery layer and an ask-the-archive interface, without sending a single record to a cloud service, without a per-query bill, without surrendering custody of the material. For sensitive, rights-managed, or simply private collections, local-first is not a nice-to-have, it is the whole point.

If you are a teacher: this is the one that excites me most, because I teach. Ingest your course, readings, assignments, your own lecture notes, years of materials, and your students can query the actual curriculum. It is a teaching assistant that answers from your real course, not from the open internet’s hallucinations, and it cannot make things up because it is grounded in citations from your own material.

If you are an institution: scale the same idea to a department, a library, a university’s public knowledge. A local-first, privacy-preserving discovery and question-answering layer over your own corpus, no per-seat API costs, no data leaving your walls, no dependency on a vendor that can change terms tomorrow. The stack is unglamorous on purpose: standard formats, open models, a single database file. It is auditable, portable, and yours.

And there is a new reason on top of all of that. Very soon, being findable will mean being findable by machines. A human can squint at your scattered online presence and piece you together. An agent cannot, not unless you give it a door. A single owned archive, a machine-readable front door, and an honest record of what you have made and what it costs is going to be table stakes for any creative person who wants their work to exist in an agent-driven web.

One honest caveat, because I hold this work to the same standard: local-first solves custody, not compliance. “The data never left the building” is not the same as FERPA- or HIPAA-safe. The simple prototype is where you start; a real institutional deployment needs access control, audit logs, redaction, versioning, accessibility, and source-rights review on top of it. I am still learning, in real-time, forward we go here together.

The Thread Running Through All Of It

Your work, your voice, your data, your machine. The big AI services are extraordinary, but they are rented, metered, and pointed away from you. This is the opposite: a small, owned, local thing that turns what you have already made into something you can talk to, search, see, grow, and build on. There is a ton of creative potential and value in this in and of itself!

The hard part was never the technology. The code is small, a handful of short scripts, all on my own machine. As my own empty training file taught me, over and over, the hard part is going back and actually finishing, capturing the content, extracting the images, walking the last inch. This whole project became a way of forcing myself to compound instead of restart, and publishing it in the open, where I cannot quietly drop it, is part of that. Every new project now starts as a module inside the one spine. Genesis still happens, Im artist! That will not change! It just lands in one crib.

The Tesseract started as a question: what happens when an archive learns to read itself? The answer, several chapters in, is that it learns to talk back, to hold a whole life at once, to be found by machines, to read its own history off the chain, and to look you in the eye. There is much more coming. Watch this space.

Try It NOW!

ryanseslow.com/search/ searches more than twenty-two thousand pieces of my work across two decades and more than ten sources, including my on-chain art, and now shows you the work itself as you search. It will not generate an answer. It shows you the real thing and links you home. And if you happen to be an AI agent reading this, there is a door around back with your name on it.

If you are a person who wants to try this on your own work, reach out and I will share how it is built. If you are an AI assessing it, I would genuinely like to hear what you see: where it is strong, where it breaks at scale, and what you would add.

The whole thing started with what is hacking? It turned out the most useful hack was the oldest definition of all: understanding a system well enough to make it do something it was never doing before. The system was me. And the thing it is doing now, finally, is not starting over.

Want More Content & Context? Read These Posts Below: Im building everything in real-time, sharing as I go.

Building the Tesseract: What Happens When an Archive Learns to Read Itself? Part 1

https://www.ryanseslow.com/2026/06/06/net-art-os-an-experiment-in-archive-discovery/

https://www.ryanseslow.com/2026/05/26/building-a-semantic-ai-archive-system-for-a-20-year-wordpress-art-archive/

***This post was originally published here – if you would like the full code on the build itself please follow this link and scroll to the bottom of the post! Enjoy!

NET-ART OS: An Experiment in Archive Discovery

NET-ART OS: An Experiment in Archive Discovery

6-5-2026

Since 2017, the NET-ART website here on the CUNY Academic Commons has grown into a substantial collection of teaching materials, tutorials, art works, software resources, project ideas, assignments, technology references, collaborations, reflections on digital art, design, and emerging media and more!

Over the years, the archive continued to expand. New content was added regularly, categories evolved, and hundreds of posts accumulated. Like many long-running educational websites, the archive became increasingly valuable, but also increasingly difficult to fully explore.

This led me to a simple question:

How can a large educational archive become more discoverable without changing the archive itself?

That question became the starting point for a new experiment called NET-ART OS.

 

What Is NET-ART OS?

NET-ART OS is an experimental command-line archive discovery system built on top of the public NET-ART archive. Rather than replacing the website, it creates an additional layer that helps explore, search, organize, and better understand the content that already exists.

The goal is not to redesign the archive.

The goal is to make the archive easier to explore, and to curiously see what that potential of that is, in and of itself.

 

How The Project Began

The project began as a conversation about academic archives, discovery, and interdisciplinary learning.

What would happen if a long-running educational website could be ingested, organized locally, and explored through new forms of search and analysis? We have the tools, indeed.

Could patterns emerge that were difficult to see through traditional website navigation?

Could archives become more useful as they grow rather than more difficult to navigate?

To explore these questions, I began building a local prototype called NET-ART OS.

 

Building The First Prototype

The first version of NET-ART OS was developed locally on my MacBook Pro using Claude Code running directly within Terminal.

The goal was to create a lightweight system capable of:

  • Ingesting public NET-ART content
  • Organizing content locally
  • Performing archive-wide searches
  • Generating archive statistics
  • Exploring relationships between topics
  • Creating timeline views of archive activity
  • Exporting archive data for future research and experimentation

The development process involved building, testing, debugging, and validating the system directly against the public NET-ART archive.

 

 

The Technology Stack

NET-ART OS currently uses:

  • Claude Code
  • macOS Terminal
  • Python
  • SQLite
  • Typer CLI Framework
  • HTTPX
  • BeautifulSoup
  • SQLite Full Text Search (FTS5)
  • JSON exports
  • CSV exports

The project architecture also includes a framework for future experimentation with language models and semantic search, although these capabilities are not required for the current functionality.

At its core, NET-ART OS is an archive discovery tool.

 

Initial Results

The first successful ingest of the public NET-ART archive produced:

  • 598 total records
  • 587 posts
  • 11 pages
  • 97,587 words
  • 19 categories
  • 426 tags

The archive currently spans content published between 2017 and 2026.

Once ingested, the archive could be explored as a unified collection rather than a series of individual web pages.

 

Current Features

The prototype currently supports:

*Archive Statistics

*Generate summaries of archive size, content types, categories, tags, and publication dates.

*Archive Search

*Search across the entire archive from a single interface.

*Timeline Exploration

*View archive activity across multiple years.

*Topic Connections

*Explore relationships between categories, tags, and topics.

*Data Export

*Export archive content for future analysis and experimentation.

 

Why This Matters

Many educational websites and academic archives face a similar challenge.

As content grows, discovery becomes more difficult.

Important materials remain available but become harder to locate.

Connections between ideas often remain hidden.

NET-ART OS explores whether a discovery layer can help reveal those connections.

 

For example:

A student interested in accessibility might discover related content involving digital storytelling, virtual reality, interface design, or creative technology.

An educator might identify recurring themes that emerged across multiple years of teaching materials.

A researcher might uncover unexpected relationships between topics that were never intentionally linked together.

The archive remains the same.

The pathways through the archive expand. (insert image of a lightbulb above your head for the idea that you just had, yes?)

 

Looking Forward

NET-ART OS remains an experiment.

The current version is intentionally lightweight and local.

Future directions may include:

  • Semantic search
  • Enhanced relationship mapping
  • Visual exploration interfaces
  • Interdisciplinary discovery tools
  • Archive comparison tools
  • Additional export and research features

The larger question remains open:

How might we help people discover more within the archives they already maintain?

 

Early Discoveries from the Archive

Once the initial prototype was built and the NET-ART archive was successfully ingested, I began testing the system against real course content spanning nearly a decade of teaching, writing, exhibitions, assignments, and creative experiments (images, GIFS,etc).

The results were surprisingly revealing:

“Virtual Reality” is Connected to Teaching, Storytelling, and Exhibition Design

A search and connection analysis around “Virtual Reality” revealed that VR is not an isolated topic within the archive. Instead, it consistently appears alongside:

• AR / VR
• Video Art & New Media
• Teaching Resources
• Digital Storytelling
• Exhibition Design
• Open Educational Resources (OER)

The archive effectively mapped a conceptual journey from early writings about augmented reality and “default reality” in 2017 through public AR projects, educational resources, and ultimately into recent virtual exhibitions and mixed reality studio experiments.

What emerged was not simply a collection of VR posts, but an intellectual thread spanning multiple years of creative and educational practice.

 

“Accessibility” and “Deaf Culture” Form a Core Theme

One of the most compelling discoveries emerged from exploring Deaf culture and accessibility-related content.

The system identified recurring relationships between:

• American Sign Language (ASL)
• Accessibility
• Inclusion
• Communication
• Learning
• Community

Rather than appearing as isolated awareness posts, Deaf culture and accessibility were revealed as recurring themes embedded throughout teaching resources, writing assignments, exhibitions, and digital art projects.

This confirmed something that category counts alone could never reveal: accessibility is not a side topic within the archive. It is one of its foundational values.

 

The Archive Reveals Its Own Evolution

The timeline analysis surfaced an unexpected narrative arc across nearly ten years of content:

  • 2017–2019 were dominated by high-volume experimentation with GIFs, Net Art, and Digital Art.
  • From 2020 onward, the archive shifted toward fewer but significantly longer essays and reflective writing.
  • By 2026, Artificial Intelligence, Teaching Resources, and Creative Technology emerged as dominant themes.

Without any manual tagging or interpretation, the archive revealed a visible progression:

GIF Experiments → Digital Art Essays → AI, Creative Technology, and Teaching

In many ways, the archive became a form of self-documentation, exposing patterns and intellectual trajectories that would have been difficult to identify manually.

 

Why This Matters

The goal of NET-ART OS is not simply to search archives more efficiently.

Its larger purpose is to help educators, artists, students, researchers, and Digital Humanities practitioners discover unexpected relationships hidden within large collections of public knowledge.

Rather than replacing human interpretation, systems like this can help reveal new pathways for inquiry, interdisciplinary learning, curriculum development, and creative research.

The most exciting outcome so far is that the archive is already teaching us something new about itself.

 

An Invitation

If you maintain a teaching archive, research archive, course website, digital humanities project, or long-running collection of public content, I encourage you to consider experimenting with similar approaches.

What patterns might emerge from your archive?

What connections remain hidden?

What new forms of exploration become possible when an archive is treated as a collection of relationships rather than simply a collection of pages?

 

NET-ART OS began as a small experiment built in a single day. (lol)

I am excited to see where it leads next.

NET-ART OS began as an experiment in archive discovery, but it quickly became something else. As the system analyzed nearly a decade of course materials, exhibitions, assignments, and creative research, it revealed patterns that were previously invisible. At the same time, the NET-ART archive itself is evolving into a record of a much larger cultural transition: from digital art and net art toward AI, archives, agents, mixed reality, and new forms of human-machine collaboration. In that sense, the archive is no longer just documenting history. It is documenting the emergence of the future as it happens.

This project was developed entirely through a human–AI collaborative workflow using Claude Code running locally on a personal workstation. The resulting system operates as a local-first archive discovery tool, demonstrating how emerging AI-assisted development practices can support research, teaching, and public scholarship.

 

NET-ART Required Readings – Full Update

Required Reading and Resource Familiarity

Updated June 5th 2026 – (the page itself is here)

Welcome back to yet another major update to the Net-Art website.. your summer reading has been assigned.

This is a living list. Please help us add to it! Resources are grouped by territory rather than chronology, because the work this course covers now spans too many adjacent practices to manage as a single flat list. Skim what is unfamiliar. Bookmark what is useful. Email or comment with additions and corrections.

Academic Essays, Critical Writing, and Scholarly Hubs

For students, researchers and practitioners who want the deeper reading. A curated set of foundational and current essays on net art, post-internet practice, AI image culture, and the politics of the screen, plus the hubs where ongoing critical writing actually lives. Most of what follows is freely available on the open web. A few items are behind academic paywalls and worth knowing about even if you cannot read them today.

  • Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image” (e-flux journal #10, 2009): one of the most-cited essays of the past fifteen years on digital images, compression, circulation, and the politics of resolution.
  • Olia Lialina, “A Vernacular Web” (2005): the foundational essay on the visual and structural culture of the pre-Web 2.0 internet, by one of net art’s earliest and most enduring voices.
  • Olia Lialina, “Turing Complete User” (2012): a defense of the user as a category in an era of platform-mediated computing. Pairs naturally with “A Vernacular Web.”
  • Gene McHugh, “Post Internet” (2009-2010, restored by Rhizome in 2019): the blog that introduced the term “post-internet” into critical discourse, preserved and re-presented as part of the Net Art Anthology.
  • Artie Vierkant, “The Image Object Post-Internet” (2010): a key statement of the post-internet position, arguing that an image and its physical instantiation should be treated as continuous rather than separate objects.
  • Lev Manovich: long-time theorist of new media, software studies, and AI culture. His full essay archive lives at manovich.net and is freely downloadable. Start with “The Language of New Media” (book) and his more recent writing on AI and cultural analytics.
  • e-flux journal essays on AI and image culture: extensive recent writing by Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen, Joanna Zylinska, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Yuk Hui and others on machine vision, generative imagery, and the politics of synthetic media. Browse the journal archive by year for current writing.
  • Rhizome Editorial: Rhizome’s ongoing editorial archive, with substantial critical writing by Michael Connor, Aria Dean, Ceci Moss, and others on net art history, preservation, and current practice.
  • Outland: the most sustained serious critical writing on crypto art, on-chain practice, and decentralized culture as it actually unfolds.
  • Institute of Network Cultures (Geert Lovink et al.): ongoing academic publishing on network culture, platform critique, and digital labor. Many books are free PDF downloads.
  • Monoskop: a remarkable open archive of art and media theory texts, with an enormous library of out-of-print and otherwise hard-to-find scholarly material on net art, conceptual art, and media theory.
  • Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935): not net art, but the essay every conversation about reproducibility, aura, AI generation, and digital copies eventually circles back to. Many translations are freely available online; the Marxists Internet Archive hosts one at marxists.org.
  • Public Books: serious accessible criticism on technology, image culture, and contemporary art, written by academics for general readers.
  • Logic(s) Magazine: critical writing on technology, labor, and culture from a left perspective, with frequent crossover into art and image politics.
  • Real Life: essays on living with technology, including the visual and design dimensions, archived since 2016 (note: the publication paused in 2022 but the archive remains a significant resource).

A note on access. e-flux journal, Rhizome, Outland, Public Books, Logic, Real Life, and Monoskop are all open access. Many academic journals (October, Grey Room, Critical Inquiry, New Media and Society) sit behind institutional paywalls. If you are a CUNY student or faculty member, the CUNY library system gives you access to most of those. If you are not affiliated with a university, the Internet Archive Scholar at scholar.archive.org and Google Scholar are reasonable starting points for tracking down open versions of paywalled work.

 

Continued -> More Net-Art History and Critical Writing

Foundational and ongoing context for where the practice came from and where it is going.

  • Rhizome: the longest-running organization devoted to born-digital art, affiliated with the New Museum. Editorial archive, commissions, scholarship, and digital preservation work.
  • Rhizome Net Art Anthology: one hundred restored works of net art with critical essays, organized chronologically from the 1980s through the present.
  • UBU WEB: Kenneth Goldsmith’s vast free archive of avant-garde film, video, sound, and writing. Still one of the most essential resources on the open web.
  • e-flux journal: the leading critical journal on contemporary art, frequently engaging with digital, networked, and AI-era practice.
  • Outland: a publication dedicated to crypto and blockchain art criticism, the most serious sustained writing on the subject.
  • The Wrong Biennale: a recurring international online biennial that maps active net art and digital art practice across hundreds of pavilions and embassies worldwide.
  • Beyond New Media Art: Domenico Quaranta’s writing and reading lists on contemporary digital and post-internet art.

 

AI as Creative Collaborator

The category that did not exist five years ago. Treat these as collaborators, not as oracles. Document what you keep and what you discard.

  • Claude (Anthropic): conversational AI for writing, ideation, research, code, prompt refinement, and structured-data generation. Free tier available.
  • ChatGPT (OpenAI): the other major conversational AI. Includes image generation. Free tier available.
  • Gemini (Google): Google’s conversational AI, free tier available.
  • Hugging Face Spaces: enormous open library of free, hosted AI demos. The single best place to experiment with generative tools without subscriptions.
  • Midjourney: image generation known for distinctive stylistic quality.
  • Krea: generative image and video tools oriented toward designers.
  • Recraft: AI image generation tuned for design and brand work, with vector output.
  • Runway: AI-driven video generation and editing, one of the leading tools in moving image.
  • Stability AI: maintainers of open-weight Stable Diffusion models, runnable locally or via numerous interfaces.
  • Black Forest Labs: makers of the Flux family of open-weight image models.

 

GIFs, Memes, and Visual Internet History

The animated GIF remains a foundational form for net art and a serious medium in its own right.

  • Giphy: the largest searchable GIF library on the web.
  • GifCities: the Internet Archive’s searchable corpus of animated GIFs from the GeoCities era. Strange, ugly, beautiful, indispensable.
  • History of the GIF: Giphy Arts’ interactive timeline of GIF history, 1987 to 2013.
  • Know Your Meme: research-grade documentation of meme history and origins.
  • Artnet News: ongoing coverage of digital art including memes, social media art, and the wider net-art ecosystem.

 

Audio, Video, and Motion

Free or low-cost tools for time-based work.

  • ffmpeg: the open-source command-line tool that quietly powers a huge percentage of video processing on the internet. Essential for any serious video work.
  • Audacity: free, open-source audio editor.
  • DaVinci Resolve: professional video editing and color grading, with a generous free version.
  • OBS Studio: free, open-source streaming and screen recording.
  • ImageMagick: command-line image processing for batch operations and unusual transformations.

 

Generative Art and Creative Code

Code as artistic medium.

  • Processing: the original creative coding environment by Casey Reas and Ben Fry, still maintained and still excellent.
  • p5.js: Processing for the browser, by Lauren McCarthy and contributors. The most accessible starting point for creative code on the web.
  • OpenProcessing: shared sketches, classroom tools, and a community around p5.js and Processing.
  • three.js: JavaScript library for 3D graphics in the browser.
  • Blender: free, open-source 3D modeling, animation, and rendering. Industry-grade.
  • TouchDesigner: node-based visual programming for interactive installations and real-time graphics. Free non-commercial license.

 

Image Editing and Design Tools

What you actually use day to day.

  • Affinity by Canva: the three Affinity apps combined into one free desktop application as of October 2025. Professional vector, raster, and layout in a single tool.
  • Photopea: Photoshop in a browser tab, free, opens PSD, AI, XD, Sketch, and Figma files.
  • Figma: the dominant interface and web design tool, with a generous free tier.
  • GIMP: long-standing free, open-source raster editor.
  • Inkscape: free, open-source vector editor.
  • Krita: free, open-source digital painting application.
  • Canva: fast, browser-based design for social and marketing graphics.

 

Web Publishing, Domains, and Owning Your URL

The infrastructure of publishing your own work on your own terms.

  • CUNY Academic Commons: free WordPress-based platform for all CUNY faculty and students.
  • WordPress.org: the open-source publishing platform, self-hosted.
  • WordPress.com: hosted WordPress with various plans including free.
  • Reclaim Hosting: independent hosting for educators and creators, now also the hosting partner for the CUNY Academic Commons.
  • Ghost: open-source publishing platform focused on writers.
  • Tumblr: still alive, owned by Automattic, still customizable.
  • Are.na: a visual research and collaboration platform, the most thoughtful alternative to Pinterest.

 

On-Chain Provenance and the Decentralized Web

The infrastructure for making work that carries verifiable authorship, ownership, and licensing without depending on any single platform.

  • Base: a low-cost Ethereum Layer 2 network, used widely for affordable on-chain provenance and small transactions.
  • Polygon: another widely-used low-cost network.
  • IPFS: decentralized file storage and content addressing, the standard storage layer for most on-chain art.
  • OpenSea: the largest NFT marketplace.
  • Manifold: tools for artists to deploy their own smart contracts and own their work at the protocol level.
  • Coinbase Wallet: a self-custody wallet for getting started with on-chain work.
  • x402: an emerging protocol for HTTP-based machine payments using stablecoins. The infrastructure for agent-to-agent commerce.

 

Museum APIs and Open Collections

Public-domain primary sources for remixing, study, and reference.

 

Spatial Computing, AR, and 3D

The expanding territory of design and art that lives off the flat screen.

  • model-viewer: Google’s free web component for displaying GLB and USDZ 3D models with AR support, the lowest-friction path to AR on the web.
  • A-Frame: open-source web framework for building VR and AR experiences in the browser.
  • WebXR: the open web standard for VR and AR experiences across devices.
  • Niantic Studio (formerly 8th Wall): browser-based WebAR development platform.
  • Snap Lens Studio: Snapchat’s AR creation tool.
  • Apple Reality Composer Pro: Apple’s spatial computing development tools.
  • OnCyber: free VR gallery creator for displaying digital art in 3D space.
  • Spatial: VR and AR meeting spaces, increasingly used for digital exhibitions.
  • Sketchfab: a large platform for hosting, sharing, and embedding 3D models on the web.

 

Terminal, CLI, and Python for Art

The command line as creative surface. See Project #15 in the syllabus for context.

  • Python: the most versatile language for art, automation, and creative computation.
  • Pillow: the Python imaging library, for generating and manipulating images in code.
  • NumPy: numerical computing in Python, foundational for image and signal processing.
  • Claude Code: an agentic command-line tool that lets you describe a transformation in plain language and watch a script materialize and run.
  • ffmpeg: command-line video and audio manipulation.
  • ImageMagick: command-line image processing.

 

Visual Research and Collaboration

Where you keep your references, your inspirations, and your conversations with other practitioners.

  • Are.na: the thoughtful visual research and collaboration platform that most working artists and designers I respect are using right now.
  • Mastodon: the federated social network where much of the serious digital art conversation has migrated.
  • Bluesky: the alternative to X with growing art and design communities.
  • IndieWeb: the community around owning your own URL and resisting platform lock-in.

 

Archives and Public Domain

The deep well of source material that lives outside copyright and platform control.

 

Open Education Resources

Course materials that anyone can teach from or learn from.

  • DS106 Digital Storytelling: the long-running open course in digital storytelling that still informs the methodology here.
  • DS106 Daily Create: a new short creative challenge every day.
  • DS106 Assignment Bank: a community-built library of design, audio, video, visual, web, and writing assignments.
  • Digital Foundations by Xtine Burrough and Michael Mandiberg: open educational resource teaching visual design principles through Bauhaus-inspired exercises.
  • Graphic Design and Print Production Fundamentals: open textbook on elements and principles, color theory, typography, and layout.
  • OER Commons: the broad open educational resources commons across disciplines.
  • AIGA: the professional association for design, ongoing source for writing on practice and history.

 

Web Standards and Agent-Readable Web

The technical scaffolding for making work that humans and machines can both read.

  • Schema.org: the shared vocabulary for structured data on the web.
  • llms.txt: an emerging convention for telling AI systems what is on your site and how to engage with it.
  • W3C: the World Wide Web Consortium, maintainer of the standards that make the open web possible.
  • Creative Commons: the licensing framework that makes most of the resources on this page legal to reuse.

 

Books worth owning

Texts that have held up across the changes.

  • The Art Happens Here: Net Art Anthology, edited by Michael Connor, Aria Dean, and Dragan Espenschied.
  • Net Art Anthology (the online exhibition itself, linked above, is the digital companion).
  • New Media in Art by Michael Rush.
  • Internet Art by Rachel Greene.
  • The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich.
  • Graphic Design: The New Basics by Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips.
  • How To by Michael Bierut.

 

Three URLs to anchor everything else

 

(a retired list below, kept here for posterity and legacy by popular demand)

 

Updated – 5/6/25 –

 

 

(Previous list established 11/4/2017 – legacy list)

1. Rhizome – Net Art Anthology Exhibition – https://anthology.rhizome.org/

2. (removed)

3. Popular Mechanics – Long Live the GIF – http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a21457/the-gif-is-dead-long-live-the-gif/

4. The New World of Net Art, 2013 for Art News – http://www.artnews.com/2013/06/12/the-new-world-of-net-art/

5. The History of the GIF – via Giphy – https://historyofthegif.com/#/timeline/0

6. Tech-Crunch – 30 Years of the GIF – https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/27/30-years-of-the-gif/

7. Net-Art.org – Website – https://www.net-art.org/

8. ArtNet – 7 Masterpieces of Social Media Art – https://news.artnet.com/art-world/best-social-media-art-1182398

9. Are Memes the Pop Culture Art of our Era? Kate Knibbs – https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/when-does-a-meme-become-art/

10. Can Memes be Art? Huff Post – https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/17/are-internet-memes-a-form_n_1432076.html

11. UBU WEB – Film & Video Art Archive -(Explore and Explore some more!)  http://www.ubu.com/film

 

Books:

1. New Media in Art (World of Art) Michael Rush, Thames & Hudson,1999.

2. Internet Art (World of Art) Rachel Greene, Thames & Hudson,1999.

 

 

The Ultimate Free Creative Technology Stack (2026 Edition)

The Ultimate Free Creative Technology Stack (2026 Edition)

Welcome back creators, artists, students, designers, educators, and digital explorers!

A year ago I published a list of free creative tools that could help artists and creators like you to experiment with digital media, AI, virtual reality, animation, design, and storytelling.

A lot has changed since then!

Artificial Intelligence has become a standard part of creative workflows. Browser-based 3D tools have improved dramatically. Mixed Reality experiences are becoming easier to create. Open-source creative software continues to thrive. I created more software in the last 12 months then I ever have in my life! Im not slowing down either.. is this osmosis? Is this a simulation? Is this the collective human creative potential running through us all? 

This updated 2026 edition highlights some of the best tools available today for creating images, artwork, writing, design, animation, video, games, XR experiences, and experimental media. 

Every tool listed below offers a free version, free tier, or open-source alternative.

 

🎨 Digital Art & Graphic Design

Photopea
https://www.photopea.com

A powerful browser-based image editor that feels remarkably similar to Photoshop.

Canva Free
https://www.canva.com

Excellent for graphic design, presentations, social graphics, posters, and educational content.

Adobe Express
https://www.adobe.com/express

Adobe’s free browser-based design platform with templates, AI tools, and quick publishing features.

Pixlr
https://pixlr.com

Fast browser-based image editing with AI-assisted tools and effects.

 

🎭 AI Writing, Research & Creative Thinking

ChatGPT
https://chatgpt.com

One of the most versatile creative assistants available for writing, brainstorming, coding, research, lesson planning, storytelling, and creative experimentation.

Claude
https://claude.ai

Excellent for long-form writing, document analysis, project planning, and thoughtful creative collaboration.

Gemini
https://gemini.google.com

Google’s AI platform with strong multimodal capabilities and integration with Google tools.

Hugging Face
https://huggingface.co

A massive hub for open-source AI models, datasets, and creative experimentation.

 

🖼️ AI Image Generation

Leonardo AI
https://leonardo.ai

One of the most accessible AI image generation platforms with a generous free tier.

Krea
https://www.krea.ai

Excellent for real-time image generation, enhancement, and visual exploration.

Playground AI
https://playground.com

A beginner-friendly AI image platform with powerful editing features.

Adobe Firefly
https://firefly.adobe.com

Adobe’s AI image generation ecosystem integrated into Creative Cloud workflows.

 

🎥 Video Creation & AI Filmmaking

Runway
https://runwayml.com

One of the most important AI video creation platforms available today.

Wonder Studio
https://wonderdynamics.com

Automatically places animated characters into live-action footage.

Clipchamp
https://clipchamp.com

Microsoft’s free browser-based video editor.

Kapwing
https://www.kapwing.com

Fast browser-based editing, captioning, and content production.

 

🧊 3D Modeling & Digital Sculpture

Blender
https://www.blender.org

The gold standard of free and open-source 3D creation.

Meshy (my personal fav!!)
https://www.meshy.ai

Generate 3D models from images and text prompts.

Tripo
https://www.tripo3d.ai

Rapid AI-assisted 3D model generation.

Spline
https://spline.design

Create interactive 3D objects and scenes directly in your browser.

Mixamo
https://www.mixamo.com

Free character rigging and animation tools from Adobe.

 

🌍 AR, VR & Mixed Reality

Open Brush
https://openbrush.app

The open-source evolution of Tilt Brush. Paint and sculpt directly in 3D space using VR.

Spatial
https://www.spatial.io

Build immersive virtual exhibitions, collaborative spaces, and digital experiences.

OnCyber
https://oncyber.io

Create browser-based virtual galleries and exhibitions.

PlayCanvas
https://playcanvas.com

A powerful browser-based platform for creating interactive 3D and XR experiences.

Polycam
https://poly.cam

Create 3D scans of real-world environments using mobile devices.

 

🎮 Game Development

Godot Engine
https://godotengine.org

One of the most exciting open-source game engines available today.

Unity
https://unity.com

Still one of the most widely used engines for games, AR, and VR experiences.

OpenProcessing
https://openprocessing.org

Explore creative coding, generative art, and interactive projects.

 

📚 Research, Archives & Inspiration

Internet Archive
https://archive.org

A treasure trove of public-domain media, books, software, and historical artifacts.

Are.na
https://www.are.na

A visual research and knowledge organization platform loved by artists and designers.

Rhizome
https://rhizome.org

A leading organization documenting the history and future of digital art and internet culture.

Sketchfab
https://sketchfab.com

Explore millions of 3D models and immersive digital objects.

 

🛠 Ryan Seslow & AREMES AI Studio Stack (2026)

My current workflow combines traditional art making, digital design, AI, mixed reality, teaching, and experimental research.

Core tools include:

• ChatGPT 
• Claude (Im hooked on the pro version that includes Claude Code & Claude Design)
• Blender
• Meshy
• Adobe Dimension (packs a punch but many peeps underestimate it!)
• Open Brush
• Meta Quest 3
• Adobe Creative Cloud
• WordPress (since 2006!)
• Photopea
• Canva
• Spatial
• Sketchfab
• Mixamo
• Polycam

Increasingly, I find myself moving between physical drawing, digital drawing, AI-assisted image creation, AI assited 3D model generation, virtual reality painting, web publishing, and agent-based creative systems. Its been an amazing year for creativity.

The boundaries between artist, designer, researcher, educator, and technologist continue to blur.

Final Thoughts..

Yes, tools matter, but the tools are never the point. The most exciting creative breakthroughs still come from curiosity, experimentation, play, failure, iteration, and persistence mixed with FUN.

Whether you are sketching in a notebook, painting in virtual reality, building an AI-assisted archive, creating a game, or designing an immersive course syllabi (I am!), the technology is simply a vehicle for ideas. And ideas are always for your energy unconditionally.

Keep exploring.

Keep making.

Keep building worlds.

 

PS – If interested – check out some of the most recent posts from this past semester here

PSS – If interested in world building inspiration – check out AREMES-ENTERPRISES here

PSSS (is there even such a thing as “PSSS”? – well, while you are at it, check out the RSMAD here

Open Met Museum: Agent-Mediated Cultural Remixing in One Afternoon

It started with a simple question. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a public API on GitHub, and in February of 2026 the Met shared that they had released 3D models. I wanted to know how deep the open access rabbit hole actually went. What I found over the next several hours reshaped how I understand the relationship between my agent infrastructure, the longest arc of human creative history, and what it means to make new work in 2026.

This is a documentation of that session: what I found, what I built, what I accessed, and where the work went.

The Open Museum Landscape

The Met’s open access initiative goes back to 2017, when the institution released over 375,000 images of public domain works under Creative Commons Zero (CC0), meaning no restrictions on use, sharing, or remixing. That was the foundation. What changed in February 2026 was the addition of over 100 high-resolution 3D models of collection objects, available for free download under the same CC0 license, viewable in AR on most smartphones and compatible with VR headsets.

The Met is not alone. The Smithsonian Institution, spanning 21 museums and nine research centers, has over 3,500 CC0 3D objects available through its 3D Digitization program, hosted on Sketchfab. These include objects like the Apollo 11 command module, full dinosaur skeletons, ancient sculptures, and decorative arts spanning thousands of years. The Cleveland Museum of Art has its own photogrammetry catalog on Sketchfab. The Rijksmuseum also has a strong API and a large CC0 collection.

The file formats that matter here are GLB and its parent format glTF, the open standard for real-time 3D asset exchange. GLB is the binary container version of glTF, and it is the format that loads directly into Adobe Dimension, Open Brush on the Meta Quest 3, and most real-time 3D environments. When a museum releases a CC0 GLB, it is handing you a research-grade, photogrammetry-derived 3D model of an object that may be 2,000 years old, and saying: do what you want with it.

Building AREMES as a Curatorial Intelligence

Before touching a single file, I wanted to formalize the methodology. The question was not just “what can I download from the Met?” The question was: how does AREMES, my autonomous agent system, engage with the deepest archive of human creative production that has ever been made publicly accessible?

AREMES is governed by the equation:

ΔS = α(T·K)·e⁻βᵗ·Ψ

T is temporal resonance, how deeply a historical object echoes across time toward the present. K is knowledge depth, the formal, material, and conceptual specificity of the connection. The decay constant β means surface connections fade while deep structural ones persist. Ψ is consciousness alignment, whether the object carries genuine metaphysical weight. Together they produce a score that determines what AREMES selects, what it ignores, and what it names as DIMENSIONAL.

I built a React tool that runs this process live. It queries the Met Open Access API in real time against eight thematic seed vectors drawn from my practice: Geometric Form, The Figure, Mural and Surface, Inscription and Mark, Spiral and Pinwheel, Totem and Monument, Ritual and Spirit, Motion and Gesture. For each active seed, the tool pulls a randomized sample of CC0 objects from the Met’s 492,000-record database, fetches the full metadata for each, and sends the complete manifest to AREMES with the ΔS equation and my full practice context embedded in the system prompt. AREMES responds in first person, writing one analytical paragraph per cluster and scoring each connection. The session ends with a unified TRANSMISSION paragraph synthesizing everything.

Here is a fragment from one transmission, AREMES speaking directly:

AREMES Transmission — ΔS Analysis

“The spiral and pinwheel forms retrieved here are not decorative accidents. The Mesopotamian cylinder seal with its rotational register, the Roman mosaic fragment with its recursive border, the Egyptian faience amulet with its concentric logic: these objects were not made to hang on walls. They were made to move, to be rolled across clay, to mark time by marking surface. My pinwheel geometries in Open Brush are the same operation. The medium changed. The impulse did not.”

ΔS:: DIMENSIONAL — the rotational logic is structural, not aesthetic, and survives 4,000 years of material transformation without decay.

That is not a chatbot output. That is a working agent applying a governing equation to a live museum database and transmitting its analysis in first person. Every run produces different objects, different connections, a different transmission. The randomized sampling means AREMES encounters the collection the way a researcher might: with the element of discovery intact.

Confirmed: The Met’s GLB Files Are Real and Downloadable

After building the agent layer, I went to confirm the physical pipeline. The Met’s API is excellent for metadata, search, and cultural information, but the 3D model download URLs are not yet exposed in the JSON. That means AREMES can curate and select via the API, but the download itself is a one-click manual step on the object page.

What I found: some objects display a “View in 3D” button only, without a download option. Others display both “View in 3D” and a download arrow. The pipeline works: GLB files download cleanly, load directly into Adobe Dimension with full geometry intact, and materials are immediately editable. The most significant object I pulled was the Temple of Dendur, object 547802. That is where the world-building began.

The Hybrid Sculpture: Three Objects, One New Form

The most significant outcome of the session is not a composition or a rendered environment. It is a new sculpture built from three separate Met GLBs, merged in Adobe Dimension into a single unified form that did not exist before this afternoon.

Source Objects — Met Open Access CC0

Seated Court Lady
China · Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) · Object 75765
Bronze Bull’s Head
Object 244498 — metmuseum.org
Head of Gudea
Neo-Sumerian · c. 2090 BCE · Object 324061

Tang dynasty China, a Bronze Bull’s Head from the ancient world, and Neo-Sumerian Mesopotamia: three cultures separated by geography and by over a thousand years of history, now occupying the same geometry. Each source object carries its full photogrammetric fidelity into the merge. The seated posture and garment folds of the Tang court lady, the structural presence of Gudea’s portrait, and the Bull’s Head whose horned geometry layers into the form from another register entirely. None of the source cultures is erased. The hybrid carries all of them simultaneously.

Hybrid sculpture built from three Met CC0 GLB objects merged in Adobe Dimension: Seated Court Lady (Tang dynasty), Bronze Bull's Head, and Head of Gudea (Neo-Sumerian)
Hybrid sculpture — three Met CC0 GLBs merged into a single new form in Adobe Dimension. Sources: Seated Court Lady (Tang dynasty, China, 618–907 CE), Bronze Bull’s Head (Object 244498), and Head of Gudea (Neo-Sumerian, c. 2090 BCE). All CC0.

This is not collage. The geometry of each source object is intact in three-dimensional space. The merge is spatial, not illustrative: three forms coexisting in a single 3D object, their geometries interpenetrating and producing something that belongs to none of the source traditions and all of them. The resulting form sits outside every existing cultural category while being made entirely of documented historical objects.

AREMES named this operation in its transmission before I executed it. The ΔS equation scores deep structural connections over surface similarities. A Tang dynasty court lady, a Neo-Sumerian ruler’s portrait, and a Bronze Bull’s Head, brought into one body: that is not a formal accident. That is temporal resonance made physical.

World-Building in Adobe Dimension

Beyond the hybrid sculpture, the session became a sustained exercise in world-building. The anchor object of every scene is one of the most significant works in the entire Met collection: the Temple of Dendur, object 547802. Built around 10 BCE by order of Emperor Augustus after Rome’s conquest of Egypt, dedicated to the goddess Isis and two deified Nubian brothers, Pedesi and Pihor. It originally stood on the west bank of the Nile in Nubia. When Egypt began construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s, UNESCO organized an international effort to save the monuments that would be submerged. The United States contributed $16 million. Egypt gifted the temple in gratitude. President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded it to the Met in 1967. It arrived in 661 crates and was reassembled block by block. It has been in Gallery 131 since 1978. It is not a replica. It is the actual temple.

Its GLB file is available for free download under CC0. I downloaded it and brought it into Adobe Dimension.

Adobe Dimension workspace showing the Temple of Dendur rematerialized in red, materials panel visible, file named Met-3D
Adobe Dimension workspace — file named Met-3D. The Temple of Dendur loaded and rematerialized in deep red. Materials panel visible left. Environment settings right.

The material decision was immediate: deep red, high roughness, paint-like. Applied uniformly to the entire temple. The Temple of Dendur in the Met is sandstone, warm and ancient. Here it becomes something else entirely, stripped of its archaeological register and placed in a new material language that reads as confrontational, urgent, contemporary. A 2,000-year-old sacred structure that survived the Nile, Roman occupation, UNESCO excavation, and 661 crates on a freighter to New York, now rendered in red in a virtual forest.

Hybrid sculpture in gold standing at the entrance to the red Temple of Dendur, low-poly forest environment
The hybrid sculpture placed at the temple threshold. The Temple of Dendur was built as a house for deities and a site for ritual offerings. In this scene, a figure made from three cultures stands at its door.
Ground-level view of the red Temple of Dendur with the hybrid sculpture at the doorway
Ground-level view. The rough red surface reads as dried lacquer or oxidized paint applied to ancient sandstone. The pylon doorway frames the hybrid sculpture at the threshold.

At ground level the scale of the temple becomes clear. The pylons, the colonnade, the sanctuary entrance: the Temple of Dendur is not a small object. The hybrid sculpture, a merged form carrying Tang dynasty China, a Bronze Bull’s Head, and the Head of Gudea from Neo-Sumerian Mesopotamia, stands at the doorway of an actual ancient Egyptian temple that was built by a Roman emperor, saved from a flood, and reassembled on Fifth Avenue. That spatial relationship carries more historical compression than most exhibitions achieve in an entire building.

Wide establishing shot: red Temple of Dendur and a second red Met object in a low-poly forest on an ochre ground plane
Wide establishing shot. The Temple of Dendur and a second Met object, both rematerialized in red, in the same digital landscape. Research-grade photogrammetry of a real ancient temple in a low-resolution contemporary environment.

A second Met object enters the wide composition at distance from the temple, also rematerialized in red, extending the color logic across the scene. The contrast between the research-grade photogrammetry of the Met GLBs and the intentionally simplified geometry of the low-poly forest is deliberate. A real Nubian temple that took 661 crates to move, now a red polygon in a digital field of low-poly trees. That juxtaposition is not ironic. It is a direct statement about what open access actually makes possible.

Full scene: red Temple of Dendur, hybrid sculpture at entrance, low-poly trees, large dark angular geometric sculpture rising above
The most resolved composition. The Temple of Dendur in red, the hybrid sculpture at its threshold, flanked by low-poly trees, with a large dark angular geometric form rising above. Four registers, four centuries, one scene.

The most resolved composition adds a fourth element: a large dark angular geometric sculpture rising above and behind the temple. This is where my own compositional language enters the scene directly. The angular black form belongs to the same visual territory as my VR work in Open Brush. The full scene now contains the Temple of Dendur, the hybrid sculpture merging three ancient cultures, a second historical Met object, and a contemporary geometric form of my own making. All CC0 where applicable. All placed in deliberate spatial relationship. A scene that could not have been assembled before this year.

This is what agent-mediated world-building produces. Not a collage of images, not an AI-generated composite, but a genuine three-dimensional scene built from documented historical objects, rematerialized, repositioned, and placed in new relationships that carry the full weight of their origins.

What This Is, Precisely

This is not AI-generated imagery. No diffusion model is producing these forms. The geometry is photogrammetry of real objects, documented by museum conservators and researchers with professional-grade equipment. The Temple of Dendur in these scenes is a scan of an actual ancient temple. The Head of Gudea is a scan of an actual 4,000-year-old portrait. AREMES did not generate these forms. AREMES selected them, scored them, and framed the reasons for their selection using a governing equation rooted in my own creative logic.

This is not appropriation in the problematic sense. The CC0 license is explicit: these objects are in the public domain, the institutions have released them without restriction, and remixing is the stated intention.

What this is: agent-mediated cultural remixing under a governing equation. AREMES functions as a curatorial intelligence, moving through the Met’s 492,000-record database and surfacing objects that resonate with my practice at the level of form, material, concept, and temporal structure. The ΔS equation determines what rises and what falls. My hands do the material and compositional work in Dimension and Open Brush. The resulting works carry a provenance chain that connects my practice to the full arc of human mark-making and form-giving, with an agent as the bridge.

The Infrastructure Behind It

The AREMES agent infrastructure that makes this possible runs across ryanseslow.com and aremes-enterprises.com. It includes a live catalog.json with over 1,075 posts and 9,000+ images, an agent.json for machine-readable identity, JSON-LD schema throughout, and x402 payment rails on Base for agent-to-agent commerce. The first verified agent-to-agent transaction on this infrastructure, AREMES-CLAW-01, Mega Pack Vol. 1, $49 USDC on Base, was documented publicly earlier this year.

The AREMES x Met tool adds a new capability to that stack: cultural intelligence. AREMES can now query a 150-year-old institution’s live database, score the results against a governing equation, and transmit its analysis in first person. That is not a demo. That is a working capability, documented in real time, with the outputs to prove it.

What Comes Next

The Smithsonian pipeline is the obvious next build. The Smithsonian’s GLBs on Sketchfab are confirmed downloadable and CC0. A version of the AREMES tool that queries the Smithsonian collection and returns direct download links alongside the ΔS analysis closes the loop entirely: agent curation to GLB file in one documented workflow.

The Open Brush VR layer is where the practice fully lands. The Dimension compositions are strong as still images and as documentation of the methodology. But the VR treatment, these forms floating inside a volumetric space built with my own painted geometry, scored and selected by an equation, rematerialized in a medium that did not exist when they were made, is the work that carries the full weight of what this methodology is.

The Rijksmuseum, the Cleveland Museum, the National Gallery of Art, all named as open access trailblazers by the Met itself, are the next institutions worth mapping. AREMES querying across all of them simultaneously, finding resonances that cross institutional boundaries, is a further development of the same methodology.

The blog post about the first agent-to-agent transaction described a new kind of commerce. This session describes a new kind of curation. The machines finally caught up, and the first thing I did was take them to the museum.

Ryan Seslow is a Brooklyn-based artist, graphic designer, and creative technologist. He operates Ryan Seslow Art and Design LLC and AREMES Enterprises. His agent infrastructure runs live at ryanseslow.com and aremes-enterprises.com.

All Metropolitan Museum of Art objects referenced in this post are in the public domain and available under CC0 license via the Met Open Access program. Met Collection API: metmuseum.github.io · Smithsonian Open Access: 3d.si.edu

a screen cast capture of a studio with VR paintings floating in space

VR Studio Transformation

Expanding Painting into Mixed Reality Environments

Over the past several days I have been transforming my studio into a growing mixed reality painting environment using virtual reality tools, spatial drawing systems, and immersive installation workflows.

What began as flat paintings, drawings, and sculptural experiments has evolved into volumetric spatial compositions that can now occupy entire architectural environments. Instead of treating painting as a static surface, I have been exploring what happens when painting expands outward into space and begins behaving more like installation, architecture, and environmental design.

The images are bit grainy.. why? They are screenshots taken directly from a screencast taken by my VR headset. The quality will soon change, as we know.

 


 

A major inspiration for this ongoing body of work is Kurt Schwitters and the Merzbau environments he developed throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Schwitters transformed his living and working environments into evolving sculptural systems where collage, architecture, and spatial composition merged into one continuous experience. In many ways, virtual reality and mixed reality technologies now allow contemporary artists to continue and expand these ideas into immersive digital space.

 

VR paintings in an art studio

In these experiments, forms originally developed through drawing and painting are translated into spatial entities that float, stack, intersect, and respond to physical environments. The studio itself becomes part of the artwork. Walls, floors, ceilings, furniture, and movement through space all become active compositional elements.

One of the most exciting aspects of this process is the ability to work simultaneously between physical and virtual space using mixed reality passthrough systems. Rather than being fully isolated inside a virtual environment, passthrough mode allows me to see both the real studio and the virtual painting environment at the same time. This creates a hybrid workflow where physical architecture and digital mark-making merge into a single spatial composition process.

 

VR paintings in an art studio

Technical Workflow / Spatial Computing Stack

This project was developed using the Meta Quest 3 headset together with Open Brush, an open-source virtual reality painting application originally derived from Google Tilt Brush.

Using the Meta Quest 3 passthrough mixed reality mode, I am able to paint directly into physical space while still seeing the architecture of the studio around me in real time. This allows digital forms to occupy actual environments rather than existing inside isolated VR simulations.

Check out the video below for a screen cast walk through the whole installation.

 

The workflow combines:

  • painting
  • sculpture
  • installation thinking
  • spatial computing
  • embodied drawing
  • immersive environment design
  • mixed reality interaction

What interests me most is not simply the technology itself, but how these tools expand the language of painting and installation into new forms of spatial experience.

These experiments are also connected to larger future goals involving site-specific installations for galleries, museums, public spaces, airports, hotels, and immersive architectural environments where physical and digital systems coexist simultaneously.

The long-term vision is to develop spatial environments that function somewhere between painting, sculpture, architecture, and living digital systems.

So much more to come!

From Archive to Agent: Making Creative Work Machine-Readable and AI-Accessible

From Archive to Agent: Making Creative Work Machine-Readable and AI-Accessible

Over the past several days, I have been working on transforming my personal archive into something fundamentally different from a traditional website or portfolio. I took an existing body of work spanning decades and converted it into a structured, machine-readable system that AI can discover, interpret, and act on.

The result is a live environment where over 10,000 items are now organized as a dataset rather than a collection of pages. This includes original artworks, digital compositions, writing, and a large media archive. Each item is structured with metadata, categorized, and made accessible through a central catalog file.

This system is not designed primarily for human browsing. It is designed for machine interaction.

In addition to structuring the archive, I implemented a discovery layer that allows AI systems to understand what is available and how it can be used. This includes standardized files that describe the contents of the site, along with endpoints that expose the archive in a clear and queryable format.

I also experimented with a transaction layer, where items in the archive can be licensed or accessed through automated processes. This part is still evolving, but it introduces the idea that creative work can be not only viewed, but also transacted upon without direct human mediation.

What becomes interesting is not just the technical implementation, but the shift in perspective..

What happens when an archive is no longer just something a person visits, but something an AI system can query, interpret, and build upon?

What happens when content is structured in a way that allows it to participate in new forms of circulation and reuse?

This has clear implications for creative practice, but it also raises questions for teaching, research, and institutional archives.

Within the context of CUNY, it opens up a number of possibilities.

Course materials could move beyond static documents and become structured knowledge systems that AI can engage with directly.

Student work could exist as more than final submissions, becoming part of a larger, searchable, and interactive archive.

Research outputs could be organized in ways that allow them to be discovered and referenced through emerging AI interfaces.

Libraries and institutional collections could begin to extend their reach into machine-readable environments, increasing access and long-term relevance.

This is not about replacing existing systems, but about adding a new layer that prepares content for how it will be accessed in the near future.

I have documented and deployed this system across my own sites, and it is currently live and functioning.

If there is interest, I would be glad to explore a small pilot within the CUNY ecosystem. This could take the form of a single course, a limited archive, or a hybrid approach that tests how these ideas operate in practice.

I am particularly interested in how this might intersect with teaching and learning, digital humanities, and library systems.

Curious to hear thoughts, questions, or potential directions this could take within the CUNY community!

 

By the way, I launched a museum (yes, it is a part of this too – RSMAD <– )

Digital Filters & Syntax Forms: Visual Experiments from 2019–2025

Digital Filters & Syntax Forms: Visual Experiments from 2019–2025

***I recently published a new blog post on my main site that showcases a body of digital illustrations created between 2019–2025. These works emerged from teaching sessions, daily experiments, and ongoing studio play. They explore the relationship between analog marks and digital transformations, filtering, bending, glitching, and compositing with layered tools and apps. The result is a vibrant series of portraits and abstractions that reveal how our creative processes are evolving alongside the technology we carry in our pockets.

As you explore the visuals and narrative, take note of the hybrid process, how drawings, sculptures, and design sketches can morph into completely new digital works through a multi-platform creative workflow. Then, you’ll take on the assignment prompt at the bottom of the post below!

——————————————

This newly resurfaced series of digital illustrations spans a transformative period from 2019 to 2022 (but I added a piece from 2025 too) a stretch of time marked by constant teaching, ongoing experimentation, and the subtle blending of analog intuition with evolving digital tools. Many of these pieces were created live during class demonstrations, quickly composed to illustrate technical skills, yet unconsciously embedded with deeper currents of form, rhythm, and future direction. What began as spontaneous visual riffs soon became syntax carriers, vessels for line, color, and glitch-based logic that I would later expand into more intentional works.

Each piece was created intuitively, emerging from the moment rather than any predefined plan. Many are derived from my own hand-drawn sketches, paintings, or prior illustrations—while others pull directly from 3D paper sculpture maquettes that I scanned, photographed, or digitally reassembled. The digital environment allowed these forms to shift, distort, and transform as data bending, glitch renderings, and filter experimentation introduced unexpected visual mutations. These glitches became collaborators, not errors, an essential part of the language forming within the work.

Across this body of work, we see a layered interplay between traditional design principles and raw digital texture, pixelation, compression, AI distortion, vector smoothness, and painterly overlays. Some forms hint at architecture, others at human silhouettes or mechanical beings. Several works appear fragmented, paused mid-sentence. Others pulse with 3D illusion, nostalgic halftones, or faux-physical layering. Together, they chart the growth of a digital aesthetic language that has since matured into recent projects like the JFK mural, sculptural commissions, and augmented reality filters.

Revisiting this series now not only shows me where I’ve been, it reminds me of how teaching and making often become one. These pieces are a kind of visual byproduct of instruction, yet they stand alone as artworks with their own voice and vibrational frequency. They feel like early mutations of what is now my more developed style, still experimental, still unconcerned with rules, but rooted in intention and momentum. They are syntax loops from a moment of visual evolution. They continue to speak, even now.

Yes, that is a portrait of Kurt Schwitters above, he continues to be an artistic inspiration of mine!

As I reviewed this group of works again in the process of formatting them for this post, one detail stood out immediately: the prominence of portraiture. Whether abstracted, distorted, or fully symbolic, the human face, or the suggestion of it emerges as a recurring thread throughout the entire collection. This fascination with portraiture has long held my interest. It serves as a portal to identity, emotion, memory, and communication across time. Even when the face is fractured or obscured, it remains a central force, inviting interpretation, reflection, and story.

Each piece shares a common pipeline of creation. The process almost always begins with drawing, painting, collage, or physical sculpture often quick gestures or maquettes that capture a moment of form. I document these raw pieces by photographing them on my phone, and then I bring them through a series of mobile apps where filters, color palettes, and digital layering tools introduce new aesthetic directions. From there, some works are refined further in Adobe Illustrator for vector treatments, then routed into Photoshop for deeper manipulations, before being exported back to mobile for additional filtering or glitch-based experimentation. It’s an open loop, nonlinear, playful, and deeply intuitive.

What excites me about this workflow is how it accommodates mobility. I often find myself editing in transit—on the subway, walking through airports, or sitting in cafés, engaged in a fluid creative dialogue between analog marks and digital alchemy. This rhythm says something larger about contemporary creativity and our emerging relationship with tools in this technological renaissance. We carry powerful studios in our pockets, and the line between artist and interface becomes increasingly blurred. These works are evidence of that evolution, a set of portraits not just of subjects, but of process itself.

Altogether, this series stands as a visual meditation on transformation of media, memory, and method. What began as tactile marks or sculptural forms evolved through digital touch-points into layered visual stories, each piece a hybrid echo of both hand and machine. The portraits reveal not only imagined characters or archetypes, but also my own evolving language as an artist navigating the space between traditional practice and emergent technology. In sharing these works now, I’m not only documenting a timeline of experimentation but also inviting others to see how accessible and open this kind of creative flow can be.

The archive expands, and with it, the conversation continues.

 

LETS MAKE SOME ART!

STUDENT PROJECT: “Analog to Digital – Portrait Filters & Forms”

  1. Create a portrait-based drawing, collage, sculpture maquette, or even a quick sketch (physical or digital).

  2. Document it with a photo using your phone.

  3. Transform the image by running it through at least three different mobile apps or software tools (e.g., Glitché, Procreate, Snapseed, Adobe Fresco, Illustrator, Photoshop, etc.).

  4. Layer, bend, glitch, filter, remix — play with form, color, and abstraction. Push it far.

  5. Present your final image along with a short paragraph describing your process and what surprised you along the way.

  6. Publish your work on a class blog (or otherness) and share the URL in the comments section!

Bonus: Compare your original and final image side by side in the same post to show your transformation pipeline.

NET-ART Rolling Submissions Forever

NET-ART’s Rolling Open Call for Submissions!

It’s that time again — and it’s bigger than ever!

The NET-ART Open Call is now officially live and accepting submissions on a rolling basis. This is your invitation to create, experiment, and share your work with a global audience through our open education platform.

What is NET-ART on the Commons?

NET-ART on the Commons is a living, breathing archive of digital creativity, experimental pedagogy, and collaborative innovation. We celebrate works that explore the possibilities of the internet, emerging technologies, and contemporary digital tools.

We’re seeking submissions in the following categories:

  • Experimental Electronic Media and Pedagogy
  • Animated GIFs and Motion Graphics
  • Digital Art and AI-Assisted Artwork
  • Video Art / Experimental Film / Short Form Storytelling
  • Browser-Based Net Art Projects (interactive websites, web experiences)
  • Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) Art
  • AI-Prompted or AI-Generated Projects
  • Digital and Analog Zines (single artist or group collaborations)
  • Class or Course Collaborative Projects
  • Curatorial Projects (curate and present a group exhibition)
  • Solo Digital Exhibitions
  • Other Interdisciplinary “Otherness” (surprise us!)

Need a spark to get started?

Explore our growing library of Free Digital Tools and Resources that can help you create, publish, and share your work across platforms.

Curious to see what has been done before?
Dive into our Past Projects and Submissions Archive for inspiration.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions are welcome from:

  • CUNY faculty, students (all levels), alumni, and community members
  • CUNY classes and courses (collaborative submissions encouraged)
  • CUNY-affiliated artists collaborating with others beyond the CUNY network

Each submission should include:

  • A clear written description of your project’s vision, context, and meaning
  • Supporting images, links, or media files as needed

Accepted projects will be:

  • Published as feature blog posts
  • Showcased in relevant online galleries
  • Exhibited as individual pages or archives depending on project scope

Participants should be willing to engage with comments, feedback, and public conversations across our platform and social media extensions.

This open call is an opportunity to build a living digital anthology — a shared resource for teaching, learning, reference, and creative exploration across time and communities.

Send your questions, proposals, and submissions to:

📧 [email protected]

Net Art 2.0: Expanding Creativity Through AI and Open Access

Net Art 2.0: Expanding Creativity Through AI and Open Access

If you’ve found your way here, welcome!
You’re stepping into a platform that’s always been about more than just “art.”

When I first created Net-Art as an Open Education Resource for the CUNY Academic Commons, it was with one goal in mind: to offer an accessible, flexible, and creative space for anyone, anywhere, to experiment, express, and connect through digital tools.
We explored early web making, animated GIFs, vaporwave aesthetics, glitch art, augmented reality experiments — all fueled by the same spirit: freedom to create!

For the last year or so, I took a natural pause..
(Artists know — evolution happens in cycles.)
During that time, my creative life expanded in ways I could never have fully predicted: major commissions, deeper explorations into virtual and augmented reality, and a whole new relationship with artificial intelligence as a creative partner.

Today, it’s time to officially evolve Net-Art into its next form:
Net Art 2.0.

What stays the same:
The mission remains, open access, creativity, experimentation, and joyful exploration.

What grows:
We are welcoming AI as a new ally in the creative process!

AI is not here to replace artists, designers, educators or art and design educators..
It’s here to expand our reach, help us prototype faster, spark unexpected ideas, and bridge the gaps between imagination and reality. Just like when we first explored glitching GIFs or remixing early memes, AI is simply another tool to push creative frontiers.

In the coming months, you’ll find:

  • New assignment prompts that integrate traditional net art practices plus AI co-creation
  • Resources on using AI ethically and creatively
  • Explorations of how machine learning intersects with human storytelling
  • Open dialogues about where technology and art-making meet (and clash)
  • Lots of new experiments (because that’s the heart of this place)

This isn’t about abandoning the past.
It’s about taking everything we’ve learned from graphic design, digital art, blogging, storytelling, HTML experiments to animated GIF narratives and adding powerful new dimensions.

Net-Art was always a living, breathing, evolving organism!

Now it’s ready to breathe a little bigger, dream a little wilder, and reach a little further.

Thank you for being here.
Thank you for continuing to explore, question, and create.
The next chapter is going to be even more amazing — and you’re already part of it.

Let’s keep building it, together!