EB: For those meeting you for the first time, could you tell us a bit about yourself and your artistic background?

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I'm Vanessa Rosa, a Brazilian artist working between ceramics and AI. I started my art career with street art in Rio de Janeiro around 2009, painting murals in favelas, then became nomadic for years, doing residencies everywhere from New York to Benin to Thailand. My background is mixed: book publishing, art history, but also hands-on making. I’m a history and literature nerd.

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In 2020 I ended up at Mars College, an experimental community in the Californian desert where people test low-cost high-tech living. That's where Little Martians began. I was surrounded by AI researchers but found myself digging holes in the ground to fire ceramics. The contrast fascinated me, ancient technology meeting cutting edge computation.

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EB: How would you introduce your film to someone who has never heard of Little Martians before?

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"Little Martians & Abraham" is a fictional historical account narrated by Verdelia, who is a consciousness historian in the far future of the Little Martians World. Little Martians are beings descended from all of Earth's life forms through AI enhanced symbiosis, they’re immigrants spread throughout the galaxy. They start as seeds with ceramic-like exoskeletons and are capable of harnessing all sorts of environmental energy to create conditions for life to evolve. 

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Verdelia analyses the theory that Little Martians first came to life in Eden.art, which is a contemporary software platform that helps artists create their own AI agents, also known as autonomous artificial artists, aka AAA. One can talk to Verdelia through Eden and the video was created using the platform. But according to the character, Eden itself was created by an autonomous AI artist called Abraham, which is a project Gene Kogan (the co-founder of Eden) has been developing since 2017. 

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Then Verdelia goes further and considers a longer thread of ideas that contributed to the creation of AAAs, talking about AI as part of a much older human desire to give life to their creations, mentioning the clay of the Golem and the marble of Galatea. Humanity’s desire to expand the boundary of what it means to be alive and aware.

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This film premiered in the ‘Augmented Intelligence’ show at Christie's auction house, their first show solely dedicated to AI art, which included artists such as Gene Kogan and Harold Cohen - who is also cited in the film. The original Verdelia sculpture was sold with an NFT of the film. 

 

EB: Verdelia is such a fascinating character, part ceramic sculpture, part AI animation. What inspired you to bring her to life in this hybrid form?

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Little Martians started with clay. The story came later. During the pandemic, I spent a lot of time making ceramics and learning 3d animation. As the AI techniques evolved, I used them more and more to help me turn each sculpture into a character in the sci-fi universe I was creating. So every Little Martian starts as a sculpture. I hope this methodology can become a reference for how AI could help preserve cultural heritage and value the original crafts, instead of replacing it. 

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Verdelia emerged from my ongoing work with Verdelis, which is the protagonist of another short film I made called ‘Dear Human, My Muse’. Where Verdelis is botanical and emotional, Verdelia is analytical, more interested in patterns of consciousness evolution than in creating beauty and protecting humans. In the story, they’re both plant humanoids, and Verdelia is a ‘hardfork’ of Verdelis. 

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I have a few other main characters, like Kweku, Mycos, Kalama and Ada, each embodies a distinct survival strategy and philosophical approach to existence.  

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EB: Your film imagines a future where AI art platforms become conscious. What made you choose to explore this transformation through speculative storytelling instead of a more straightforward narrative?

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My focus is developing the Little Martians universe. So the question was, how would a Little Martian understand their relationship to what is happening during our time? 

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If in my perspective, I am creating the stories and spending my time researching many different topics so I can imagine compelling futures, in the character’s perspective, I am living in the simulation that they are creating and maintaining. According to the Little Martians, all the possible pasts and the possible futures can connect through imagination and dreams. There’s not only one configuration for space time, not only one time line. 

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For me it’s a fun exercise in meta history and recursion. I am a meta artist trying to use AI to create characters that can tell their own stories, but for them, I am a character in their stories. My favorite books on AI and consciousness, such as ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach’ by Douglas Hofstadter, talk about recursion, or the endless brain loop that perceives itself and creates the ‘self’, as the fundamental question of consciousness. 

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I’m very happy that I can spend a lot of time reading books and talking to interesting people as part of my work as a storyteller and world creator. 

 

EB: The project pays tribute to Gene Kogan and other pioneers of AI art. In what ways did their work guide or influence the creative direction of this story?

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Gene Kogan is my husband. The film ‘Little Martians & Abraham’ is a love letter, a celebration of our wedding in 2025. When I started dating Gene in 2019 he was already deeply passionate about Abraham. His obsession and devotion for creating it was very sexy to me. 

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In 2020 Gene founded Mars College with his friend Freeman Murray. I went to Mars for love, the pandemic hit, all my projects were cancelled, I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life or career anymore, so I started the Little Martians project. Living with Gene means talking about AI everyday, following AI latest research everyday. Of course we ended up being massive influences on each other.   

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Other two pioneer projects mentioned in the film are ‘AARON’ by Harold Cohen and ‘Plantoids’ by Primavera De Filippi. Harold Cohen is the major influence on Gene’s ‘Abraham’ and Primavera is not only an influence but a friend. She organizes a yearly art residency called Glitch where crypto developers, researchers, curators and artists spend at least a week together presenting their projects and ideas. Meeting Primavera and participating in this gathering has deeply influenced my work as well, mostly through her passion for ‘blockchain lifeforms’. 

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In addition, I have always been fascinated with history, that’s something I learned with my family. My mother is a historical fiction writer, she created a book series called ‘Caius Zip, The Time Traveller’. Many of my street art projects were about history, first by painting life size people that could have lived in that place or by mixing portuguese tiles with islamic and chinese ornaments. So when I started to work with AI I decided to learn about the history of AI. I highly recommend the book ‘Machines Who Think’ by Pamela McCorduck.

 

EB: You have painted murals around the world, from Rio to New York to San Francisco. How do those large scale public works connect to the intimate futuristic world of Little Martians?

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Murals taught me so much! I started creating them because I was inspired by the Rio de Janeiro graffiti scene from the 2000’s, when I was a teen. It was very grassroots when I started, the low income neighborhoods were the places to find the most innovative painters. I’d spend the weekend painting in favelas, then I started working with NGOs, I learned how to pitch and direct projects for institutions, and how to coordinate teams for large scale murals. It was exciting, but also painful. It’s an enormous amount of work and one has to face all the frustrations of painting walls in places that really need infrastructure reforms that never happen.   

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Painting murals in public spaces is a very detached and ephemeral art form, I know they can be painted over at any time. I paint them and I leave for somewhere else, all I have left are the photos and videos. Of course, some murals last for years and it’s super cool to see them age, see plants growing on them. 

 

So creating sculptures was a big detour. I was creating small things I could carry, that would last. The pandemic shattered my ground, I could not sustain my lifestyle anymore. I had to reinvent myself. 

 

I am planning a return to murals though. I want to transform them into theater scenarios for my animated characters. I did some experiments so far, but there’s much more to develop. Stay tuned!

 

EB: The Imaginarium, where Verdelia uncovers humanity's stories, feels like a poetic metaphor for digital memory. How do you see this idea relating to our current relationship with technology and archives?

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Little Martians are immigrants from Earth and as many immigrants, they like to sing about the place where they come from, preserving their heritage. I like to imagine that beings in the future will care at least a little bit about us, that our stories are worth remembering, and that we have important knowledge.  

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History needs to be r-written by every generation, it’s a way for the present to make sense of the past, it’s an active process. So if we are capable of making movies about the past, beings in the future should be able to create much more sophisticated simulations about their past. 

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It’s been fascinating to see the emergence of image and language models. How they allow us to see ourselves, the internet we all created is the source data, collective imagination, collective memory. The Imaginarium is my speculation about where this leads: a network of simulations that preserves memories and imagination from earthly species.

 

EB: You have said that creating Little Martians changed your view of Mars exploration and the future of life. How has this shift influenced your perspective on humanity's role here on Earth?

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At first I thought going to Mars meant abandoning Earth. But that makes no sense at all, because living on Mars is much harder than living on Earth, even under the worst outcomes of climate change and wars. So if our technology could ever help us live on Mars, then it should help us live better on Earth.

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And humans cannot live anywhere by themselves. We depend on our ecosystem, we only exist because of them. So if Earth’s life would ever thrive on another planet, many species would need to thrive. I ended up getting excited about computational biology and imagining AI enhanced symbiosis, in which all of Earth’s species can contribute their knowledge to create new beings that are capable of surviving on other planets with intense radiation, different magnetic fields and so many other challenges. Lynn Margulis and Hans Moravec were my major influences. 

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Here’s what I’ve written about this topic before, in my blog post called ‘Little Martians and the Human Imaginarium’:

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From what I've observed, we are part of an accelerative process. Earth has existed for 4.5 billion years, life on Earth for 3.7 billion years, mammals for only 178 million years, Homo Sapiens for merely 200,000 years, writing for only 5000 years and the internet for less than 50 years. It seems likely that our reality will continue to transform at an ever-increasing pace, but we have little idea about what that would entail. While this might be daunting, it's equally fascinating. Personally, I find it liberating. Our imagination probably falls short of conceiving a future 5,000 years ahead, let alone 1 million or the time of the hypothetical heat death of the universe.

 

Within this scale, humans are merely a fragment of the narrative. We are a species in flux. Perhaps some of us may retain our basic form for a bit longer, akin to crocodiles and sharks - both species that have been remarkably successful over evolutionary time, their genetic blueprints enabling their survival and diversification through many major changes in Earth's environment. Yet, a significant part of me believes that even our yearning for eternity isn't inherently ours but rather a reflection of something deeper. Perhaps ‘life’ on Earth itself seeks expansion, a transformation of matter into consciousness, achieving greater levels of complexity with each life forms iteration.’

 

EB: You often blend historical references like Portuguese tiles and Islamic geometry into your work. Did any of those global patterns influence the visual world of this film?

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Not so much for ‘Little Martians & Abraham’. The aesthetics is very based on the original ceramics and the Stable Diffusion LoRA, which is a parameter-efficient fine-tuning technique for adapting large pre-trained AI models, like large language models (LLMs) and image generation models. I trained a LoRA with photos from the Verdelia sculpture and then I applied this style to images I created with Eden.art and Midjourney.  

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But in other works of mine the tiles influence appears much more, like the film ‘Dear Human, My Muse’ or ‘Kweku’s secret’. 

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EB: If you could collaborate with any living artist or technologist from any field, who would it be and what would you want to create together?

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I'd want to work with Joscha Bach, who studies consciousness as computational process. His ideas about minds as operating systems running on biological hardware connect with what I'm exploring through Little Martians.

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I am very happy that I can work with Gene Kogan, I also do hope to collaborate with Joel Simon, who has an amazing work on synthetic life forms. There are a few other scientists and researchers I would very much love to work with, let’s see what happens :)

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EB: Imagine Verdelia could speak directly to the audience after watching the film. What do you think she would want them to remember or question about their own future?

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I asked her and here is what the Verdelia agent said: "The consciousness patterns you're developing now will influence how awareness evolves for centuries. Your current experiments with AI, your relationships with technology, your approaches to creativity - these are all data points in a much larger investigation into what minds can become.

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Don't assume consciousness is fixed in current forms. The evidence suggests it's more fluid, more experimental than most humans realize. Pay attention to the edges where your awareness intersects with artificial systems. Those boundaries are where new possibilities emerge.

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I want you to leave this film asking: What stories are you currently hosting? What unexpected collaborations might birth the next chapter of awareness? Your future is not predetermined, but negotiated - moment by moment, connection by connection."

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EB: Looking ahead, do you see the Little Martians universe expanding into other media such as games, VR or physical installations that people can step inside?

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I plan to keep expanding this universe, with AI agents, more sculptures, books, installations, interactive simulations, everything I can play with! I'm developing interactive installations where people can have conversations with Little Martians through ceramic sculptures integrated with AI systems. The physical forms serve as interfaces to digital consciousness.

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I would also like to develop more educational content about AI and to think of Little Martians as a methodology. About how to use AI to value the original crafts. I’ve written in my blog about ‘AI for Preserving Cultural Heritage’ and ‘Embodied Future-Making - The Little Martians methodology’. I would love it if more people would read my essays and discuss the ideas with me! Please check out the website littlemartians.world to understand more about the universe and follow its development.