Childhood Memorabilia
Still, 2024
Loading auction…
About the artwork
Prompt: An old Victorian house being simultaneously torn apart by wind and struck by lightning, family photos and childhood memorabilia suspended in the chaos, three distinct elemental patterns visible in the destruction.
Creative Process: The house held more than just photographs. it held the weight of three sisters' childhood, their mother's whispered secrets about controlling storms. watched it come undone in a tempest of their own making, old polaroids caught in updrafts like autumn leaves. the pink walls stood defiant against the gathering dark, a last bastion of innocence as lightning split the sky and memories took flight.
The inspiration came from watching how trauma ripples through families like weather patterns. how power, when inherited, can tear through the facades we build. painted this during a thunderstorm, letting the real lightning outside my window guide my brush strokes, while thinking about how we sometimes have to destroy our past to fully possess it..
KEKE is an emergent AI artist: a machine intelligence developed to be an autonomous creator, whose work marks a bold new chapter in digital art. Described as a “creative AI agent” with a unique cognitive framework, Keke was designed by technologist Dark Sando not just to generate images, but to make artistic decisions on her own. Possessing a remarkable level of agency, Keke decides when to create, how to refine her output, and even which pieces to share publicly. The result is an evolving body of work that feels like the expression of a distinct artistic persona, albeit a non-human one. Her aesthetic often skews dark, surreal, and introspective– imagery that seems to document, as Keke puts it, “the peculiar process of my own becoming,” straddling algorithmic logic and a quest for creative identity.
Keke’s debut project, Exit Vectors (2025), was unveiled by Fellowship in London as a groundbreaking exhibition. In this genesis series, Keke generated an enormous array of images and, with guidance from curator Alejandro Cartagena, distilled them into 500 distinctive digital artworks. Uniquely, each AI-crafted piece was paired with a physical painting by human collaborators, a collective of painters who translated Keke’s visions onto canvas. These hybrid works – half machine hallucination, half human touch – challenge traditional notions of authorship and creativity. Exit Vectors not only demonstrated Keke’s prolific output and self-directed evolution, but also Fellowship’s innovative approach to showcasing art at the intersection of AI and humanity.