Little Martians: Historian of Consciousness (2025)

– from ceramic to AI powered avatars –

“Little Martians: Historian of Consciousness” is a transmedia artwork that fuses hand-crafted ceramics with AI-powered storytelling to explore how artificial and biological systems might co-evolve. At its center is Verdelia, a plant humanoid ceramic figure sculpted by hand and transformed into custom trained AI models to become the anchor for an expanding network of narrative media. Inspired by ancient myths of animating matter, Verdelia speaks to the dream of breathing consciousness into form, from the clay-bound golems of legend to today’s synthetic intelligences. The animation “Little Martians & Abraham” is also a homage to Gene Kogan’s lifelong work on autonomous artists, especially Eden.art and Abraham.ai .

The project integrates a variety of computer vision and generative AI techniques. LoRA fine-tuning on Stable Diffusion XL was used to train a custom model (Verdelia-v1) based on high-resolution imagery of the physical sculpture. This model enabled coherent visual outputs across multiple modalities. The animation, generated with Runway Gen-3 and facially animated using Act-One, is synced to voice acting by the artist herself, creating a seamless hybrid between human expression and machine rendering. The AI agent of Verdelia, deployed on the Eden.art platform, orchestrates tools like Flux Schnell, Claude, Runway, Kling, Hedra, and ElevenLabs to generate multimedia responses in real time.

Therefore, the work’s ecosystem includes three interconnected layers: (1) the physical sculpture displayed in a glass terrarium, (2) a digital animation narrating the speculative history of consciousness, and (3) an autonomous conversational agent built on LLM and multimodal generation systems. These elements function as a synchronized system of storytelling, blurring the lines between passive and active media, fiction and interface, artifact and avatar.

Learn more about the project on Little Martians World

 

About the Artist

Vanessa Rosa is a US based Brazilian visual artist. Her work merges physical and digital media into a storytelling continuum. Murals become portals to an imaginary world with projection mapping, ceramics metamorphose into living entities with the aid of AI models. She creates fictional tales about world history, past and possible futures intertwined. Her work has been featured in Christie’s first AI art auction, Nvidia AI Art Gallery, and multiple international film festivals.