Caterpillar. Chrysalis. Butterfly. Each word immediately understood as part of a three-part process of metamorphosis, this story we know. It is also the story of many, from the aquatic, for instance the jellyfish who experiences not one, but no less than six vibrantly diverse stages during their life-cycles. Yet, commonly these are transformative states that we have no associative image of, they are stories untold.

These works form a speculative mapping through creating mutating chimera that attempt to map the limits of our knowledge by infusing a familiar story with an essential “jellyfishness” as its most commonly associated. The caterpillar, a gelatinous beginning. The ghostly traces of the metamorphic vessel, the chrysalis. The emergent finale, the vividly iconic butterfly as an airy, ethereal figure.

These works were created using generative adverserial networks, or GANs, wherein the the higher layers of one neural networks model were blended with the lower layers of a second neural network, effectively crossbreeding the latent spaces of two distinct species and habitats.