In a Show at Stanford, Miljohn Ruperto Trolls the Death Drive of AI Guys
An ARTnews review of Miljohn Ruperto’s exhibition at Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center highlights new works that use AI and digital tools to critique extraction, colonialism, and the environmental costs behind technology. Ruperto’s “Fathoms (Tartarapelagic)” (2025–26) generates AI-made creatures based on species recently discovered in the Pacific Ocean’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone, where mining for manganese, nickel, copper, and cobalt—materials used in AI technologies—threatens real ecosystems. The show also includes a reanimation of a 1977 photograph of a two-day, mile-high dust storm linked to Chevron-related agricultural practices, and a book mapping 123,663 stars around a planet thought to contain diamond cores. Additional works reference Caspar David Friedrich’s “Monk by the Sea” (1808–10) via counterfeit reproductions made in a Chinese village known for copying European paintings, and a tent installation where visitors use Meta VR goggles to view Thomas Cole scenes recreated in Unreal Engine, connecting today’s digital “frontier” rhetoric to earlier settler-colonial imagery.
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This story was covered in Restitution Reckonings and Biennale Blowups