The series comprises sculptures, video installations, texts and a film essay that inquire into reverse archaeology via AI models and datasets of 3D scans of documents relating to cultural and natural history. Aimed at reconstructing missing fragments within sculptures of classical antiquity, fossils and other paleontological and cultural objects, the computational knowledge models are exercised in speculative, object-oriented historicism through derived, never-before-existent yet algorithmically 'accurate' quasi-documents of synthetic histories.
Content Aware Studies series inquires into the aesthetic, philosophical, and historiographical outcomes of computational and particularly in relation to modern generative AI models, reconstruction and generative reinterpretation of the objects of art of classical antiquity and in particular to fill the voids of the missing fragments. The automated algorithmic training is performed on the manually assembled dataset over thousands of 3D scans of friezes and sculptures of the era. The series concerns the prospects of methods involving data, ML, AI, and other computational automations turning into semi- and quasi-archeological knowledge productions when performed to augment historical and cultural studies in the era of ubiquitous planetary-scale computation. Some of these algorithmic outputs are then turned into new machine-fabricated sculptures uncanny in their algorithmic integrity. They render the work of synthetic agency that lends faithful authenticity to the forms, while also producing eerie errors and algorithmically bizarre normalisations of forms previously standardised and regulated by the canon of Hellenistic and Roman art. These speculative forms of restoration, museology, and historiography provide a case study for critical examination of possibly misleading trajectories of algorithmically augmented research and knowledge production, poisoned by epistemic focal biases occurring at the level of software architecture of radical complexity. Preoccupied with biases, misleading guises, quasi-authenticities, and mixed-up entanglements of material and informational domains, it seeks to examine epistemological issues. The series questions: what epistemics do such methodologies hold by uncovering deeper and sharply unsuspected new knowledge or instead masking unacknowledged biases? In the optics of a non-human agency of the AI-investigator, what of our historical knowledge and interpretation encoded into the datasets will survive this digital digestion? How are historical narratives, documents, their meaning, and function perverted when their analysis has been outsourced to machine vision and cognition? What changes can we anticipate in historical knowledge and documentation during the era of the information overproduction epidemic and generative reality modeling?
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Content Aware Studies, solo show, Alexander Levy, Berlin, DEU, 2019.
'The World through Ai', group show, Jeu De Paume, Paris FRA, 2025.
NTAA’22, New Technological Art Award, group show, Zebrastraat Ghent, BEL, 2021.
Content Aware Studies (CAS) series is comprised of a vast amount of data, AI experiments, objects, moving image works, films and essays. It inquires how the use of machine learning in historical analysis and reproduction as a scientific tool brings to the forefront ethical questions of bias contamination within data and automation of its analysis. Inspired by examples of confusing para-scientific interventions such as AI-based Voynich Manuscript decryptions, the CAS series examines the various sides of this inquiry. It also speculates about material objects as synthetic documents of machine-rendered histories.
The objects from the initial iteration of the CAS series came through methodologies developed with data scientists and based on training artificial neural networks aiming to replenish lost fragments of sculptures, friezes and other objects of classical antiquity as well as to generate never-before-existing, yet algorithmically genuine, objects of that era. The research examined outputs of advanced AI models trained on datasets consisting of thousands of 3D scans of classical sculptures from renowned international museum collections. The models generated by the algorithm were then 3D-printed in various synthetic materials, filling the voids in eroded and damaged marble sculptures. Some of these algorithmic outputs were turned into entirely new marble sculptures carved by machines. Uncanny in their algorithmic integrity, they posed questions about whether they can be considered objects of classical antiquity. They render the work of a synthetic agency that lends faithful authenticity to the forms, while also producing bizarre errors and algorithmic normalizations of forms previously standardized and regulated by the canon of Hellenistic and Roman art.
CAS 04 Parthenon South XI 31 (2018)
This work is generated from a real-world dataset consisting of high-resolution digital scans and photographic documentation of the Pergamon Altar reliefs. Originally created in the 2nd century BCE, the altar’s sculptural friezes depict the Gigantomachy - a monumental narrative of cosmic struggle between gods and giants - fragments of which have survived through excavation, displacement, and museum reconstruction.
Machine-learning models trained on these fragmented reliefs analyse stylistic, anatomical, and compositional patterns embedded in the historical material. From this data, the system generates speculative continuations of missing or damaged forms. These algorithmic inferences are then translated into a marble sculpture, materialising a version of the altar shaped not by archaeological consensus, but by statistical reasoning.
Rather than restoring the past, CAS 04 Parthenon South XI 31 exposes the instability of historical narratives when cultural heritage is processed as data. The work positions the algorithm as a contemporary myth-making agent, producing a new fragment that reflects both the violence of historical loss and the interpretive logic of machine intelligence.
CAS Portrait Series
The CAS Portrait Series examines, initiated in 2018, portraiture as a shifting technical regime in which the human face functions less as representation than as an operational surface for inscription. Generated from real-world datasets of digitised ancient sculptural portraits—primarily fragmented Hellenistic and Roman heads - the series situates classical sculpture within a longue durée of media systems that encode, transmit, and regulate cultural memory¹.
Following Friedrich Kittler, these ancient portraits are approached not as expressions of subjectivity but as material outputs of specific inscription technologies—stone, tools, workshops, and institutional frameworks¹. Their contemporary digitisation marks a further epistemic shift: sculptural matter is translated into discrete data structures, entering what Wolfgang Ernst defines as a time-critical media regime, where historical objects are processed outside narrative continuity and reconstituted through operational machine time¹.
Against this media-archaeological determinism, the series introduces a set of theoretical counterpoints. Vilém Flusser’s notion of technical images as apparatus-generated abstractions becomes central here: the algorithmic portraits are not images of faces but visualisations of a program, surfaces where the logic of the apparatus manifests itself². The portrait ceases to be a mirror of the human and instead reveals the conditions under which visibility itself is produced².
Luciana Parisi’s concept of algorithmic thought further destabilises human-centered interpretation³. In this framework, the machine does not merely execute predefined instructions but generates synthetic futures through speculative computation. The portraits emerge as expressions of an algorithmic rationality that exceeds human intention, producing forms that are neither errors nor reconstructions, but anticipatory propositions shaped by probability and excess³.
Yuk Hui’s theory of technics and cosmotechnics reframes the dataset as a culturally and historically situated system rather than a universal abstraction⁴. The ancient archive, filtered through modern digitization and machine learning, embodies a collision of cosmologies: classical anthropomorphic order is reprocessed through contemporary computational epistemologies⁴. The resulting portraits thus register a discontinuity between cultural worlds, revealing how technological systems carry implicit ontologies of time, form, and identity⁴.
Within this theoretical constellation, the CAS Portrait Series positions portraiture as a site where anthropocentric memory collapses into mechanic operation. The face persists, but only as a residual effect of technical processes that no longer serve commemoration or representation. What remains is a post-anthropocentric artifact - one that exposes how cultural heritage is continuously re-authored by the epistemic frameworks of its mediating technologies¹–⁴.
References:
1. Parikka, Jussi. What Is Media Archaeology? Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.
2. Flusser, Vilém. Post-History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
3. Parisi, Luciana. “Algorithmic Thought: Computation as Critique.” In The Technological Condition, edited collection, 2015.
4. Hui, Yuk. Art and Cosmotechnics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press / e-flux, 2021.
CAS Portrait Series
The CAS Portrait Series examines, initiated in 2018, portraiture as a shifting technical regime in which the human face functions less as representation than as an operational surface for inscription. Generated from real-world datasets of digitised ancient sculptural portraits—primarily fragmented Hellenistic and Roman heads - the series situates classical sculpture within a longue durée of media systems that encode, transmit, and regulate cultural memory¹.
Following Friedrich Kittler, these ancient portraits are approached not as expressions of subjectivity but as material outputs of specific inscription technologies—stone, tools, workshops, and institutional frameworks¹. Their contemporary digitisation marks a further epistemic shift: sculptural matter is translated into discrete data structures, entering what Wolfgang Ernst defines as a time-critical media regime, where historical objects are processed outside narrative continuity and reconstituted through operational machine time¹.
Against this media-archaeological determinism, the series introduces a set of theoretical counterpoints. Vilém Flusser’s notion of technical images as apparatus-generated abstractions becomes central here: the algorithmic portraits are not images of faces but visualisations of a program, surfaces where the logic of the apparatus manifests itself². The portrait ceases to be a mirror of the human and instead reveals the conditions under which visibility itself is produced².
Luciana Parisi’s concept of algorithmic thought further destabilises human-centered interpretation³. In this framework, the machine does not merely execute predefined instructions but generates synthetic futures through speculative computation. The portraits emerge as expressions of an algorithmic rationality that exceeds human intention, producing forms that are neither errors nor reconstructions, but anticipatory propositions shaped by probability and excess³.
Yuk Hui’s theory of technics and cosmotechnics reframes the dataset as a culturally and historically situated system rather than a universal abstraction⁴. The ancient archive, filtered through modern digitization and machine learning, embodies a collision of cosmologies: classical anthropomorphic order is reprocessed through contemporary computational epistemologies⁴. The resulting portraits thus register a discontinuity between cultural worlds, revealing how technological systems carry implicit ontologies of time, form, and identity⁴.
Within this theoretical constellation, the CAS Portrait Series positions portraiture as a site where anthropocentric memory collapses into mechanic operation. The face persists, but only as a residual effect of technical processes that no longer serve commemoration or representation. What remains is a post-anthropocentric artifact - one that exposes how cultural heritage is continuously re-authored by the epistemic frameworks of its mediating technologies¹–⁴.
References:
1. Parikka, Jussi. What Is Media Archaeology? Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.
2. Flusser, Vilém. Post-History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
3. Parisi, Luciana. “Algorithmic Thought: Computation as Critique.” In The Technological Condition, edited collection, 2015.
4. Hui, Yuk. Art and Cosmotechnics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press / e-flux, 2021.
CAS Generative Video Series
The CAS Generative Video Series constitutes a set of algorithmically mediated visual investigations derived from sculptural datasets. Each video documents a continuously evolving computational process in which machine-learning systems interpret historical forms - comprising 3D scans, surface textures, and fragmentary data - and generate dynamic, real-time visual outputs.
Rather than producing static reproductions, the series foregrounds process over product, emphasising the procedural and temporal nature of algorithmic agency. In this framework, the videos enact a negotiation between archival memory and generative speculation, exposing the ways in which computational systems operationalise historical datasets. The emergent forms thus occupy an interstitial space between historical reference, speculative reconstruction, and machinic materiality, making visible the temporalities, biases, and structural logics embedded within algorithmic interpretation.
By rendering algorithmic processes perceptible, the series invites a critical reflection on the role of artificial intelligence as a methodological and epistemic agent in cultural heritage studies, highlighting how computational systems can both reproduce and transform historical knowledge.
‘Museum of Synthetic Histories’ Essay Book Cover.
Published Writtings
A series of essays on Synthetic Histories, Hylomorphism and Materiality, and Predispositions by Design in which the work Content Aware Studies is at the centre as a case study for the proposed critique of AI-driven methodology in historiography.
Links to downloadable PDFs:
2022 ‘Museum of Synthetic Histories’ - E. Kraft, E. Kormilitsyna | Published by BCS. Learning and Development Ltd. Proceedings of POM Conference, UDK Berlin 2021
2021 ‘On Content Aware and Other Case-Studies’ - E. Kraft, E. Kormilitsyna | Published by City University of Hong Kong, HKG
Content Aware Studies, solo show, Alexander Levy, Berlin, DEU, 2019.
NTAA’22, New Technological Art Award, group show, Zebrastraat Ghent, BEL, 2021.
‘Museum of Synthetic Histories’ Essay Book Cover.
