NADESCHDA BARENJE

Three projects: LAJFI (evolutionary algorithm), MIN_BILD_AI (GAN on 7843 photographs), EXTERN_AI (LoRA into 2.3 billion others'). Who creates when control is distributed?

Self-evolving ecosystem. Organisms compete, reproduce, mutate across generations. 32 genetic parameters. The algorithm introduces variation, my selection filters. Of 400+ exported champions I chose 23 for materialization.

LAJFI organisms in physical material. The forms are grown by a system I built: I design the rules and the conditions, then let it generate the shape. Each one is 3D-printed in PLA, invested in a plaster-quartz mold, burned out, and the void filled with glass, cast glaze, or aluminium. Same DNA, different materiality. Shown at Solna Konsthall, 2026, on plinths and on a steel grid. The viewer cannot determine which is the 'original' because there is none.

Material between glass and ceramic, my own recipe: frit, quartz, kaolin, bentonite, and beach sand, cast in plaster-quartz molds. Where it pools it crystallizes, where it thins it goes translucent; graphite in the batch makes it opaque. Organisms as test bodies. Beach sand as reinforcement: grains don't melt, they sit as structure. Some pieces electroformed in copper. 100% my material, or 0%, depending on how you look at it.

Same organisms, different materials. The grid is the tensor, the array: the data structure carrying neural network weights. When an organism cracks during electroplating I don't know whose fault it is.

Self-trained from scratch on my whole camera roll, photographs of my life rather than curated pictures of work. Two attractors: dark dense forms and bright flat compositions. The failure became a portrait. 858 Python files, 9 repos.

12.7M LoRA parameters into 2.3 billion others'. GAN produces abstractions only meaningful to me. Diffusion interprets through its collective filter. The result existed in neither before they met.

Left: cast glass discs. Right: my sister's removed breast implants flanking a glass dome. Same silicon, different chemistry. A lens makes the invisible visible. An implant makes the added invisible. PLA from lactic acid. Lac, milk. The breast produces milk. The implant sits in the breast. PLA printed, burned out, void fills with glass. Milk, silicone, glass. All silicon, all body, all fake, all real.

A cake and the Tower of Babel sit at almost the same point in latent space. I found them there by thinking the way the network thinks before I built it: form it in tiers, let everything taper upward, until the celebration and the construction share one silhouette. Then I trained a model of 47 million weights to walk the short distance between the two points, and blew the stops into glass. Six objects, between ten and thirty-five centimetres, on a tray of casting sand. The sand under them is the material glass is formed in, a step in production that happened to follow the work into the room.

The first thing you see is form. The cake and the tower share a grammar, tier over tier narrowing toward the top. The form also carries the meaning. The model set the two points side by side because they share something I had not seen until I walked through it. The tower rises toward God. The cake toward a birthday that is never meant to end. The same upward movement, toward something without end, though one rite is sacred and the other worldly. The birthday is the vertical gesture we kept after him, a piety with no one to address.

Babel is the word that makes the link possible. It most likely comes from Bab-ili, the gate of God, but the story reads balal into it, confusion. One name holds the entrance and the collapse. That is exactly what the model is to me. A gate to connections I could not see, and a confusion, because the moment I see them the model and I are speaking about the same image in two languages that do not translate. The punishment at Babel was that everyone suddenly spoke differently. The tower was left standing. The fragmentation was punishment enough, and it turns up already at my worktable.

Glass is where I force the meaning to commit. To call the network a material is an act, and glass is the test of whether the act holds. Whatever does not survive the translation from weight to volume falls away, and what remains on the tray is the object's actual claim. A spade stands in the sand with a hand grown into its shaft. The hand is the system's, the form came out of a prompt. Where does the tool end and the hand that holds it begin? The spade gives no answer. It is made never to disappear into the hand as a tool that works.

So I built a third pair of eyes. I have studied networks and built networks to learn to think like a network that is meant to think like a human, and the glass objects speak a third dialect that neither the model nor I command alone. Whether the collective attempt to understand ends like Babel, with each of us speaking a language of our own, I do not know. I have taught a model to walk the short way between a cake and a tower, and blown them into glass so that I can hold them. The rest is a suspicion that the gate and the confusion were spelled the same all along.

One blow gives two glasses. The cup is blown in a plaster mould that sets the volume, and above the mould the cap swells out freely. The glass is cracked at the middle: the lower part becomes a drinking glass, the cap already has the shape of a coupe and becomes a party glass. The cap is thin enough to go up to the temperature of the warming oven and is mounted warm, on a stem and a foot formed freehand. Two rules govern the foot, the area and the thickness of the strands. The rest is movement. The series is made in different colours, and two glasses in the same colour still never come out the same. Perennial. The base form mutates between rounds.

Scold's bridle and corset in black ceramic and wire. Golden blown glass swells inside, pushing against restraint.