Self Portrait , No More Masks
The Unmasked Flow
This is the beginning of a larger project I’ve been envisioning for some time.
The core idea is simple but ambitious: place multiple physical paintings in a shared space, each one remaining completely still as the fixed anchor of truth — the unmasked self I have spent 37 years trying to reach through painting. Around and between them, AI trained solely on my own body of work generates a continuously evolving “floating world” that spills outward from the edges of the canvases and blends seamlessly from one painting to the next.
The paintings stay respected and unchanged. The floating world — inspired by Ukiyo-e’s sense of transience and impermanence — represents life evolving once unmasked: the truth keeps flowing and changing while the core remains.
I see this as an immersive experience rather than a traditional exhibition. Viewers would walk through a living dialogue between hand-painted permanence and machine-mediated transience, confronting the same questions I have been asking on canvas for decades: rupture, honesty, and the stubborn persistence of hope in darkness.
The AI is not here to replace the hand. It is here to extend the unmasking — to go deeper into the psychology of human experience, using technology to become more connected to the reality trapped within the art itself.
This project is still in its early stages. The Tile Fish, Turtle, and Self Portrait animations you see here are the first small tests. The goal is to eventually create a full installation where the floating world envelops the space, powered by the 2-gigawatt hyperscale AI data center I am building in San Antonio — designed to be environmentally transformative as a step toward sustainable intelligence.
Dark yet hopeful.
I am excited to continue developing this vision and would welcome conversations with institutions or spaces interested in immersive, cross-disciplinary work.
