Sun Deity reflects on technology, digital imagery, and history. Before the industrial revolution, religion and theology held the dominant position in the belief system hierarchy, then were displaced by science and technology, and are now extended to artificial intelligence. Sun Deity refuses this linear discourse and proposes a non-hierarchical way to describe the same phenomenon — the sun. 

 

Sun Deity is a digital monstrance that synthesizes the imagery of historic sun gods across cultures, examining the ancient mythologies and their relation to present human perception. At the center of the monstrance is a morphing sun god. Using a custom AI workflow, the artist trains an AI model on the archive photographs of the sun gods from various civilizations: Ra, Surya, Helios and Amaterasu. The CGI monstrance presents the modern components: the molecules of hydrogen and helium, a satellite, and a running human. This digital monstrance generates sun god imagery, co-authored by the machine, that resembles but cannot be identified as any of the historic sun gods, inviting the audience to rethink the correlation between the imagery, concept, and beliefs. Sun Deity enacts a way to speculate on imagery, one that deems all perceived imagery equal, a flat ontology.

​

The video is produced through a hybrid pipeline combining custom AI workflow with CGI. The artist trains a LoRA adaptation of the Flux diffusion model on a curated 44 photographs of historic sun god artworks across four civilizations from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's online collection. The trained model then generates synthesized sun god imagery that resembles each tradition while belonging to none. The artist then creates a morphing sequence with the generated images using latent space interpolation. This central generation, after being edited in After Effects, is composited into a CGI monstrance modeled, animated, and rendered separately in Maya and Arnold. The artwork is a 2-minute looping video.

​