For my drop with @QuantumNFT, I collaborated with AI to create 80 animations as an ode to the quietly brewing resistances within each of us and throughout the universe.

quantum.art/collection/spannungsbogen

It is inspired by Frank Herbert's Dune and by growing up in the Sahel — a thread🪡

I have been working with AI for a year and a half, and this collection, titled 'Spannungsbogen', is from the third model I worked with.

I handpainted 2000 acrylic vignettes for the dataset, and aside from the consistent colour palette, I played with everything else.

When I started painting the dataset for this project, I was going through depression and therapy was particularly challenging — my childhood was on my mind... the good, the bad, and everything in between.

I re-read Dune, as I often do when I feel the ground shaking beneath me.

Sci-fi gives me the courage to see the world as mutable and to remember that change is the only constant in the universe.

Given how I felt when I embarked on this project, I needed to hear this message. It makes sense that it would show up in the collection so prominently.

My home feels a lot like Arrakis, where the book is set.

Spannungsbogen, the title of the collection, is a trait the Fremen, people indigenous to Arrakis, share with my people — the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.

Between the moment we awaken to a revolution in our mind to the moment we enact it in our lives, there is a period of brewing, intentional or not. A kind of tension while we wait for the right moment to set ourselves free.

I wanted to bring this tension to life in the works.

I am often asked how I, as an artist, establish an emotional relationship with models I work with.

To me, working with AI feels like working with a canvas that comes alive, makes itself known, and if you let it, communicates its own sensibilities.

It's emotional, deeply so.

Working with AI trained on my dataset also gave me an appreciation of how scale allowed the unconscious artistic choices I often make to bubble up to my consciousness.

I learned a lot about my approach to form, colour, and composition. I also learned that I could use more pink.

It's an incredible honour to be @QuantumNFT's 2nd digital art drop artist, following the incredible collaboration of @shavonnewong_ + @lenneigh

I couldn't have made it this far without the care and encouragement of @RodolpheK and @MariieSalome.

There is something quite beautiful about being the very first African (+woman) to bring an AI collection of this scale to the blockchain.

When I think about what this means for my sisters, Souad and Marina, it's easier to wrap my head around how historic tomorrow will be.