Always Has Been
Lumen Prize 2026 - Submission
A durational and participatory artwork that uses the same digital technologies reshaping our world — AI, blockchain, social media — to examine a dichotomy: despite extraordinary technological advancement, human nature remains the same.
Always Has Been is an artwork spanning multiple phases and diverse media telling the stories of how emerging technologies have reshaped our world. Markets serve as the conceptual throughline; their cyclicality mirrors the repetition of human behavior regardless of the era.
The artwork began with The Terminal, a limited-time interactive, immersive multimedia experience. Visitors were active participants who conversed with a bespoke LLM designed to sense the individual and collective sentiment through a series of multiple choice questions. Based on the participant's input, the LLM unlocked a historical event that impacted the financial market and also reflected their sentiment.
The event then becomes the thematic prompt for generating unique videos, texts and still images using generative AI. The visual aesthetic of these unique works comes from one of 28 windows which were each open in The Terminal for a day. The windows are curated from across time and diverse cultural and artistic movements. The resulting work feels undoubtedly new, yet, upon a second and third glance, becomes deeply familiar—creating a sense of déjà vu or nostalgia.
The Terminal is now closed, and visitors’ interactions with the work are fully documented on the Ethereum blockchain as a collection of unique events. The work then entered the second phase, where collectors are encouraged to trade, burn, or consolidate enough events to redeem them for one of the 28 windows, which grants them access to The Relics, unique physical sculptures that return the digital and artificial back to the physical and natural.
The Terminal
The Terminal is the generative and interactive core of the work, presented as an immersive 3D web environment built using WebGL. The bespoke LLM converses with visitors and provides them with multiple choices, and interprets their responses to unlock historical events. The events are then the basis for generating the video and still images using a blend of AI models from Stable Diffusion, Luma Dream Machine, and Luma Ray2 that were steered to produce the artist-curated set of visual aesthetics that defined the 28 windows. Social media gating acted as a self-selecting filter, while a dynamic leaderboard transformed individual interaction into collective behavior.
The COLLECTION
The individual outputs generated by The Terminal form the collection of events that serve as the finalized record of the month-long simulation, permanently minted on the Ethereum blockchain. A dedicated Treasury, funded by initial minting proceeds and ongoing secondary market activity, monetarily incentivizes the ecosystem. Participants can engage with these events by trading them on the secondary market or choosing to "burn" them for a share of the Treasury, effectively exchanging the digital artwork for financial liquidity. These accumulated events can also function as a bidding mechanism to acquire one of these rare window tokens. The window tokens are the rarest works within this digital hierarchy, each a unique digital artifact that signifies a complete window from the collection.
The RELICS
The Relics are the physical sculptural resolution of the digital work. The sculpture is formed by mosaicing pieces of Ulexite, a naturally fibrous mineral with geological fiber-optic properties. It uses the copper foil stained glass method to solder the stones together, often called the Tiffany method, named after Louis Comfort Tiffany who was the first design director for the now well-known Tiffany & Co., founded by his father. In addition, collaged media is placed underneath forming the back support of the piece. The polished stone surfaces form a structure that feels organic, yet on its surface it transports distinctly digital and artificial imagery. The maximum possible supply of Relics is 28, each corresponding to a window, but the true supply will be dictated by collector behavior if and when they choose to redeem a window and move it from the digital to the physical world.