Frederik De Wilde

Belgium

Where do you locate yourself in relation to the systems you work with?

I work from inside the storm, using the very tools I criticize. — I use Python, Generative AI and AI upscalers, but I refuse to buy into the myth that "the cloud" is weightless.— I am both complicit and critical. I don’t reject technology; I dissect it to show that for every digital render, there is a physical cost in water and energy.

Where are you heading, and what is pulling you there?

I am driven by a need for material accountability, collapsing the distance between the screen and the earth. — I’m guided by the urgent truth that water cools our data centers and floods our cities. — I resist the industry’s push for "faster, more efficient" to focus on the heavy, wet reality of infrastructure. — It is ecological grief that moves me. — When I see a tablet, I don't just see a screen; I see the lithium mine behind it. — This isn't art about a crisis; it is the crisis made visible.

How would you describe the space your practice is currently unfolding in?

My practice unfolds at the intersection of art, science, and technology — specifically where the invisible forces of the digital world collide with physical reality. — I explore the inaudible and intangible aspects of this crash, navigating the complex systems that are driving societal, technological and environmental shifts.

Artist Statement

STATEMENT OF TRUTH Not clock-time. Not mathematical time. But the deep, mineral time beneath us—the kind that doesn’t care if we’re here or not. Phantasmalithic is my way of listening to that silence in a post-anthropocene era. I'm not interested in speed or spectacle. I want slowness, stillness, strangeness, porousness, erosion and ambiguity. The places where identity dissolves into a relational self through a holistic non-human lens. These portraits are not just images—they're sedimented prompted rituals choreographed by generative algorithms, not to automate, but to discover and excavate. The portrait series are spectral artifacts. They melt data points in latent space, and agglomerate. Their Identities shift like vapor across a cracked AI-lens, where AI becomes a magic lantern, a phantasmagoria: conjuring beings that are both spirit and machine, tenderness and glitch. In beauty that leaks and drips and can’t be optimized. Phantasmagoria—not as illusion to be debunked, but as a truth of our time, hovering between states—solid and fluid, human and not, past and possibility, trash and treasure. This constant becoming is not confusion. It is the form of our age. A murmur of posthuman anatomies, speculative fossils, emotional glitches, and haunted futures. Each portrait is a contemporary Pietà—a digital speculative lamentation, holding the wreckage of the human in posthuman arms. But unlike the original Pietàs, Phantasmalithic doesn’t offer closure or redemption. It suspends mourning. Like Mary cradling the broken body of Christ, these portraits bear the weight of deep time and future as it’s sold to us as linear. Extractive. Dominant. Phantasmalithic proposes a cyclical collapse and rebirth. I am not here to entertain the machine. I am here to unearth what the machine doesn't know it remembers. Counter-prompting. To insist on tenderness and care in systems built without skin. This is not an aesthetic. It’s a resistance ritual. This is not the future. It’s a lithic prayer in the ruins of now anchored in deep time. It’s a digital Pietà—mourning what we are, and what we will become. It’s a phantasmagoria of possible selves.

Published in >

The AI Art Magazine, Number 3

A Cloudburst of Im/material Possessions and Metric Nightmares, AI generation, 2025.

Frederik De Wilde, A Cloudburst of Im/material Possessions and Metric Nightmares, AI generation, 2025

Description

This work is a modern warning disguised as a classical landscape. Channeling da Vinci’s Cloudburst of Material Possessions, I wanted to visualize the heavy physical cost of our so-called "light" digital lives. I created this to expose the lie of "The Cloud." It isn't weightless; it is a toxic storm where plastic junk and digital debris collide. The slash in the title—Im/material—emphasizes that every byte of data has a physical consequence. The image operates on three levels. First, I blur the line between trash and code to show that data requires real energy and extraction. Second, I hang the storm over the ocean to highlight the massive amount of water our data centers drink for cooling. Finally, the white squares blocking the view represent the "machine gaze"—algorithms that reduce nature to a dataset. It is a metric nightmare: a world being indexed to death by its own invention.

Process

The spark was a sketch from 1510. Leonardo da Vinci drew A Cloudburst of Material Possessions, depicting tools and objects raining from the sky to mock society’s greed. Looking at it, I realized that storm never ended—it just shifted from the physical to the algorithmic. Today, da Vinci’s storm is powered by the logistics of Amazon, Alibaba, and Temu. I created A Cloudburst of Im/material Possessions and Metric Nightmares to visualize the massive infrastructure hidden behind our screens. We are sold the lie that the digital world is weightless—a "Cloud." My work exposes the heavy reality behind that metaphor. I painted a storm that blurs the line between plastic trash and digital glitch, hovering over the ocean. This is the "hydro-logic" of the internet: the urgent truth that our data centers are drinking rivers of water to stay cool. The view in the artwork is obstructed by white squares and data tags. This is the "machine gaze"—a metric nightmare where nature is no longer a landscape to be admired, but a dataset to be indexed. I wanted to show that our frictionless convenience is actually a toxic weather system, raining down consequences we are trying desperately to ignore.

Tools

Generative AI, Text Prompting, Python, AI Upscalers.

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