This piece was originally made around 2010-11 for an illustration competition. It was very early in my career & it finished joint-runner-up - my first art accolade (yes I counted joint-runner-up as an accolade).
It was called 'Revolution / Riot' to show two points of view on the scene. Whether it's one of the other depends on where you're sitting...
The robot was designed to look unlike traditional renditions - vaguely human, but utterly strange. What is that beacon? Maybe it's calling for reinforcements, or abandoning it's physical form because what need does AI have for it?
As we enter the age of AI, the image feels more apt than ever. When it was made, AI was sci-fi. Now it's here. Will we cede control, place it on a throne, to rule us? Will we then rise up against a master of our own making?
It also feels fitting, in the spirit of disruptive technologies, to mint it on the blockchain, on a creator-owned contract. Recorded indelibly, for posterity - a warning, or just a record: 'we told you so'. Depends on where you're sitting...
[The only surviving version of the image was a low res, 700px-wide jpg. So I used Gigapixel (an AI tool - delicious irony) to upscale it, added a little touch of bloom & noise. But otherwise, it's exactly as it was.]
