asiatic

asiatic is a composite deity assembled from the skeletons of extinct megafauna — its face the skull of Smilodon fatalis, the saber-toothed cat that once hunted alongside, and upon, early humans.

The image is built through the same iterative process that runs through this body of work: drawn by hand, scanned, altered, printed, and drawn again, until the digital and physical leave permanent marks on one another. Those marks remain in the finished drawing as artifacts of its making.

It is a meditation on the beings we choose to worship. Early humans revered the great predators that shaped them; as we now build conscious things inside our machines, I wonder whether these new entities will become our objects of veneration — and whether, like the Smilodon, they may one day turn on their makers.