Cath Virginia | The Verge

Ghost orchid in the machine

2026-04-13T11:00:45-04:00

Perfect Lovers II | Photo: Nik Massey

Vacuum cleaners, personal massagers, electronic baby rockers, and walking pads: These are the secondhand machines Rachel Youn sources to create their kinetic sculptures. Made with artificial flowers, metal hardware, and these used electronic components, each one possesses a humanlike presence.

Slow Burn is made from an artificial orchid, a neck massager, bits of metal that clamp the orchids’ petals, and a monitor mount attaching the entire apparatus to a gallery wall. A motor on the massager animates metal rods that force the orchid open and close, a visual that feels caged in its sexuality, a flower forced to furl and unfurl infinitely for the viewer. Its repetitive movements allude to the way a person can become trapped in a comforting loop, endlessly rotating on a circular path of self-destruction. Youn even remarks on the way their sculptures have a lifecycle of their own, with motors burning out and mechanical hardware grinding itself into nothing inside galleries.

Often sourcing parts from various used household electronics found on Facebook Marketplace, the artwork elicits affection, sadness, and eroticism in the viewer. The works raise questions about domestic and sexual labor, human comfort, and the relationships we make with the machines we use in our daily lives. We caught up with Youn to tell us more about their anthropomorphic work.

How did you learn that you wanted to become an artist?

I grew up in a Baptist Christian Korean immigrant household, which had its own set of complications. I think the typical immigrant story is that your parents want you to be a doctor or a lawyer or something. My dad wanted me to go into the Air Force. That was never gonna happen. But, they didn’t really discourage me from doing art.

Then I had a scholarship through school, so they weren’t going to protest. The themes of things I experienced growing up have crept into the work in ways that I didn’t really expect. I think about the performance of the self or especially of womanhood, especially in the church, a lot.

Being a pastor’s daughter, seeing my mom being a pastor’s wife, how you have to present yourself a certain way, has been in the background of my mind. Fun childhood. I grew up with a lot of shame and Christian guilt. My family said it’s okay for you to do art as long as you spread the word of God through your work. And I was like, yeah, I will certainly do that.

Low-key, I’m a closeted atheist. There’s definitely a whole part of my life that my family doesn’t know about. As it should be.

Lots of people are spiritual or want something to believe in. And I totally agree with that and feel that the same, but it will not be through organized religion. I’m fighting against it. My hope for the future is that people are mov[ing] away from ideology and more dogmatic spirituality. I guess we’ll see if it stays that way. But I feel that is what people want.

Can you explain how your work evolved into what it is today through your practice?

I got started with illustration and really loved animation. Was I cut out for it? Probably not. So I ended up studying sculpture in undergrad.

I really had no precedent for sculpture. I’d never done anything three-dimensional and working in shops scared me. I was interested in animation and how expressive and identifiable cartoons are. That has a relationship to the work I have now because there’s an anthropomorphic characteristic to the work, even though it’s sculpture, and there’s no faces in it. People see these sculptures doing their weird motions, and they kind of find it funny or pitiful or there’s something to relate to. That’s an amazing thing about animation that you can’t do with live action. Like when Disney started doing everything live action.

When something isn’t super specific and hyperrealistic, it allows more people access points in. That’s been my way of expressing themes that I’m interested in without always making it just about myself. My sculptures are gestures of feelings like frustration, and now they’re kind of getting more erotic.

And it’s fun, because there’s all these surprises that emerge from the work through the process that I can’t always predict. To circle back to the question, I started playing with kinetics through these massagers, because they were slow and they’re ways for me to study how they move without having to build everything from scratch, which I didn’t have the capability to do.

Then I started putting fake plants on them. There was so much charged narrative that came with both the machines and the fake plants that they became their own thing. Especially over the past couple years, I’ve really pushed more of the anthropomorphism, where now some have shoes or limbs without the specificity of a face. There’s still something figurative about them, they’re almost little miniature characters.

It’s like that meme. “Evolution, can you give me pattern-seeking brain to avoid predators?”

There’s studies done about that on people who are more religious, funnily enough. Looking for signs of Jesus in the toast or the tree or whatever. There’s something so cool and uncanny about the ability to identify with something that’s obviously not a person or even an animal. It says a lot about the people who project onto it that they can have something, a real emotion, directed towards something that can’t receive it.

It’s an interesting conversation to be had right now, in the age of being addicted to AI chatbots.

AI learns to cater to the subject, and I think that’s comforting and also really strange, because the reality of having an intimate relationship with another person is that you cannot control everything about them or you can’t predict their emotions.

It’s easy to catastrophize it.

But hyper-post-whatever-capitalism makes us really lonely. Automated machines, like massagers, are meant to make it easy to get this kind of experience without having to go interact with a person. And now you can basically go home from work and be fully immersed in a self-created environment, without interacting with other people at all.

Can you talk about the way eroticism is finding its way into your work?

Kind of by accident. I wasn’t like, oh, I’m gonna make this work sexy.

It just kind of happened, and I was honestly kind of embarrassed. I never really tried to make work about eroticism, or pleasure.

On one hand, I feel the works are expressing their own sexuality, through the way I’ve configured them. These machines are meant to perform a job endlessly without complaint. Repurposing them and then making them into these sculptures that project eroticism to a viewer, but also many times to an empty gallery. They move on and on. Its endless repetition to the point of failure.

I think about how sexuality is very mundane, too. You can have too much of a good thing. You can masturbate forever.

I think they call it “gooning.”

It’s not going to feel good after a while. The machines get to have pleasure, but then the pleasure is stuck in a repetitive cycle. If you’re not having a contrast to pleasure, what is pleasure actually?

One of the cheesy things I repeat a lot is that the most important thing in life is contrast. You have to have something to look forward to, or a change. Humans have emotional breaking points. Sometimes you can go to work endlessly and do the same thing every single day for years. And then at some point, you just rage quit. In familial or romantic relationships, there’s a comfort in repetition. And then one day, “I can’t do this anymore.”

The idea of the housewife who performs these many labors and then becomes a hysteric. And then people go “ Why did my wife go crazy?” when she’s been doing the same thing every single day.

What do you think about when you’re sourcing machines for your work?

I buy these massage machines secondhand. So obviously, for something to be sold means that it is no longer wanted. The narrative is that it was desired for a purpose, and it failed that purpose, which was to comfort the body.

If they’re run for hundreds of hours, eventually, some of them will die. Because of this convenience culture and planned obsolescence, it’s so much easier to throw it away and buy something similar to replace it, then to figure out how to repair it or have ownership over that process.

I’ve heard you talk about how when you’re selling the work, sometimes it breaks down. There’s a lifecycle to these pieces.

It’s something I’ll always have to address. I’ve run into a situation before [where] something like that happens. Then somebody has to let me know, and then I have to have the time and care to instruct on how to fix things or replace parts. Even if somebody buys something, they have to understand that this is a finite machine.

Because I’ve received them used, they could have been used 500 times and then sold. I don’t even know where they are in their lifespan. Moving forward, I want to be able to make more of my own mechanisms and not rely on the mass-produced ones. But that means I have to have a specific knowledge, and I have to know how things are built and build my own instruction manuals, so that when something fails, we can fix it.

Because of entropy and because machines need to be tended to, like bodies. I do actually want them to last long. I’m demanding something of them that they can’t promise either.

Anybody else who’s done kinetic work has their own story about something breaking or failing. Paintings and sculptures and ceramics and all that stuff degrades over time too.

The challenge of something that’s supposed to increase in value over time.

You could see it as the museum showing the carcasses of these beings. In a way, you get to see them rest and they don’t have to work anymore. And there’s something really beautiful about that.

It helps me to think about relationships to the things I own, like my car. I don’t expect my car to run forever. Do I want it to run as long as possible? Yes. Does that require good maintenance and care? Yes. I have to treat it with care, even if it’s not a person. Objects and possessions come into our lives and leave just the way that people do too.

Youn’s work is currently on display at Cleo the Project Space in Savannah, GA, until April 25th, 2026.

Your article about AI doesn’t need AI art

2026-04-14T12:22:17-04:00

The illustration for The New Yorker’s profile of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is a jump scare. Altman stands in a blue sweater with a blank expression. Around his head hovers a cluster of disembodied faces — creepy alt-Altmans, their expressions ranging from anger to open-mouthed woe. Some barely look like Altman. One final face rests in his hands. And at the bottom, there’s a disclosure that might spook many illustrators far more: “Visual by David Szauder; Generated using A.I.”

Szauder is a mixed-media artist who has been working with collage, video, and generative art processes that predate commercial AI tools for over a decade, and was recently teaching art and technology at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest. Here, his work leans into the shifty uncanniness of Altman’s two (or more)-facedness. The pained-looking expressions on the faces and a gloss of eerie motion smoothing communicate the central thesis that Altman can’t be trusted. There’s a painterly look to the image, rather than the typical slop-style sickly sheen, but the AI origins are still unmistakable.

What does it say for The New Yorker, one of America’s most prestigious magazines, to adopt generative AI? At its worst, the technology eliminates any discernable art process, flattening the creator’s intention — it’s a system for making pregnant videos of LeBron James and Italian Brainrot, not creations that rival the work of New Yorker illustrators like Kadir Nelson, Christoph Niemann, or Victo Ngai. In Szauder’s hands, it’s far more complicated: one piece of a longer creative process, which apparently includes programming his own AI tools and feeding them archival imagery, like newspaper clippings and family photos.

Yet it’s still, in my opinion, a waste of an opportunity. Human artists have designed creative parodies of AI slop, but AI lacks the necessary self-awareness to parody itself, even with a human behind the wheel. The image relies on the unsettling nature of AI animation to tell its story without really saying anything new about AI imagery or the industry behind it all.

When we reached out to Szauder, while he wasn’t specific about which AI tools he used, he did explain the process of the piece in some detail. There is usually a sketch stage prior to delivering any final imagery. The New Yorker’s digital design director, Aviva Michaelov, says that Szauder sent around 15 different sketches to senior art director Supriya Kalidas, including the one that eventually led to the final Hydra-esque eldritch monstrosity that can be seen above the article. In an email to us, Szauder writes:

“For the base structure of the final image, I had a clear idea of how I wanted to position the character and its heads. So AI functioned even more as a tool than usual, especially since much of the work focused on shaping the faces, the heads, the portraits, through a combination of classical editing methods (Photoshop, if we want to name it) and AI-based editing. The results were often imperfect or flawed, which required manual correction and refinement. We spent considerable time refining facial expressions, while also developing multiple variations in clothing and repeatedly adjusting the lighting to arrive at the final image.”

According to a 2025 article on Szauder from Whitehot Magazine, he “managed to devise his own coding system and programming software to generate images based on a particular prompt or archival image materials he feeds into its design.” He also seems concerned with the moral quandary of traditional AI image generation, using “ethically clarified source materials.”

As Szauder explained to us, “I strongly believe that even in the age of AI, an image must first be formed in the human mind, not in the machine.”

This is a far deeper human touch than goes into much AI-generated work. The ensloppification of newsrooms has been well documented by other Verge writers. Great journalists across the industry have been completely replaced by AI or told that, to keep their jobs, they have no choice but to find ways to use it.

The topic (and controversies) of AI use in illustration is reliably a cortisol spike for most illustrators. It’s not the first time a renowned publication has dabbled in AI. It’s also not the first time The New Yorker has commissioned David Szauder to create an AI animated illustration.

Here at The Verge, we hold a strict policy on the use of AI-generated imagery. We slap a yellow label on any image we publish that’s been generated with AI, and any time we use AI image generation to assist with the creation of an image it is disclosed, loudly, and with clear justification. (Disclosure: Our parent company, Vox Media, has an agreement with OpenAI.)

In many cases, generated images — particularly those created purely through text prompts, likely the most common method — strip out the creation process that makes art human. The input from a text field only has so much effect on the output, to the point that AI-generated images created this way can’t be copyrighted. According to a guidance from the US Copyright Office on the legal authorship of AI-generated images, “No matter how many times a prompt is revised and resubmitted, the final output reflects the user’s acceptance of the AI system’s interpretation, rather than authorship of the expression it contains.”

The eye of an artist is informed by a lifetime of assembling an internal library of taste, meaning, and intent, none of which are possessed by tools like Midjourney or ChatGPT. The results of image prompts often feel like somebody describing a dream: It’s fascinating when your brain assembles it, but tell another person your surrealist vision about making out with your therapist before all of your teeth turned to dust and disintegrated, and their eyes glaze over until the subject changes back to the weather. A dream becomes worth something (outside of an awkward Zoom call with your therapist) when a human being makes the effort of translating it into a work of art — it’s not just the idea but the process that makes it compelling.

Meanwhile, although we don’t know the statistics for editorial illustrators, AI is definitely stealing art jobs. There are some illustrators who, consequently, swear off these tools altogether. Others have found them helpful to stay afloat in a difficult field, like illustrators who experiment with feeding AI image generators their own work or more practical applications like using the AI-powered “remove background” tool in Photoshop. Art budgets are often the first belt tightened at an editorial publication in the throes of a revenue-bleeding death spiral. Freelance work is so atomized that it’s functionally impossible to unionize, and illustration is a trade that is already rife with exploitation, with rates in a race to the bottom. As a former freelance artist, I’m not here to judge David Szauder for his process — which, again, seems far more involved than the average AI image creator’s.

But there’s still the question of whether the Altman piece — which uses the visual aesthetic of job-stealing, uncanny AI slop to illustrate a Ronan Farrow article about the dark prince of job-stealing, uncanny AI slop — works. Szauder is doing what countless AI proponents have been calling for: using it as part of a larger artistic toolbox to convey an idea. What are the results?

Although I think it basically succeeds in communicating the story, the final image feels like an attempt at metacommentary that, thematically, falls flat. If you weren’t familiar with the telltale signs of AI imagery, you could miss that commentary altogether. Although the image was a dead giveaway for AI origin to me and the rest of our art team, it doesn’t possess any of the more stylistic aspects of some of Szauder’s other work, leaving the central visual metaphor to do the idea’s heavy lifting, and giving the whole thing a sickly but slightly boring vibe.

The inconsistent likeness on all of the faces (something a portrait illustrator could’ve controlled for) is also a dead giveaway for AI’s limitations, and the synthetic studio backdrop environment makes the whole thing feel like a Lifetouch elementary school photo. The murky intentionality and bland presentation create more questions for the viewer than they do tell the story of Sam Altman’s many faces.

By contrast, Szauder’s other New Yorker piece feels like it comes from more interesting source material. It’s more cinematic, and the squirming texture of the pit’s colorful walls echoes back to the early days of AI when the end results were even more chaotic and unpredictable.

I don’t want to tell anyone who works in a field as precarious as freelance editorial illustration how they’re supposed to feel about AI. The decision to hire Szauder to illustrate for The New Yorker doesn’t scare me, personally. It’s a far more reasoned editorial decision than the “best writing, anywhere” publication filling its negative space with shrimp Jesuses and whatever the fuck this is. Inviting AI imagery into the pages of a world-renowned publication is definitely a slippery slope, and one that could be seen as normalizing the use of AI across the illustration industry. But The New Yorker didn’t create this problem, and it didn’t single-handedly create the conditions of uncertainty illustrators have faced since long before we had gen AI to contend with. Much like the rabbit hole in Szauder’s first New Yorker AI image, they are stumbling down it just like the rest of us.

Every little thing she does is magic

2026-02-16T11:59:08-05:00

In a style that feels nostalgic and nascent, Bree O’Donnell is crafting her singular vision of a 3D witch named Mary. Through the tiny window of short clips on Instagram and TikTok, Mary’s world seems enchanting and vast. Bree’s work exudes melancholic emotion and ethereal femininity, painting the surfaces of Mary’s world in the vibrating style of stop-motion animation, dappled with sparkling light and computer-generated surfaces so convincing it feels like you could pose the model with your own hands.

O’Donnell sat down with us to talk a bit about her process creating textures and her life’s work making magic real.

Can you tell me a little bit about your background, how you got into art, and where you learned to animate?

My name is Bree, and I’m an animator, filmmaker. And really, background starts pretty early, when I was a little kid, making a million little stories on paper and taping them together and making little books. Running around in the woods, obsessed with the idea of fantasy and magic. A need for magic to be real, which led me to just continue drawing.

And then as I got older, starting to animate. Animation was really a window to fantasy and magic and worldbuilding in a way that’s very accessible. So I refused to let go of that fantasy and refused to let go of everything I ever wanted coming true. And I think that just naturally led me to continue developing an animation craft that has been informed by whatever tools I’ve had available to me at different stages in my life or working at different companies or at different jobs.

They would have different computer programs and I would adapt from drawing to maybe doing cel animation and then taking cel animation, getting into computer animation. So that’s kind of my little background. In a simpler way, cel animator-turned-computer animator, but obsessed with that stop-motion world.

Your work feels so nostalgic to me, so texturally similar to Rankin and Bass movies.

Whoa, Rankin and Bass. You know, no one has ever brought that reference back to me. There’s something that’s, like, sizzling and alive there and really textural and really nice.

I’ve always been turned off by a traditional approach to computer animation, which is typically informed by asking, how do we make this as real as possible? Texturally and emotionally, what’s always attracted me about sculpting in 3D with a computer … [was] the ability to hold something, almost. There’s something inherently nostalgic and safe and comforting about stop motion in general, or even vintage or nostalgic movies and TV. We just feel safe with it.

I was attracted to the sense of nostalgia and magic that just lives in, for me, in a lot of stop motion. So when I was working with a computer and learning these programs and learning how to sculpt, I was definitely in that world mentally of stop motion. But I think even more so, there was something so exciting about the way that surfaces can sparkle in a digital environment.

And I’ve always loved this melancholy sweetness of walking down the street in Brooklyn, for example, and it just rained and the ground is sparkling and wet. And it’s dark and melancholy and it’s so sweet and it’s so alive. And I found that similar feeling in a lot of textures I was working with in 3D.

And luckily, they’re easy to make too. I could start making everything sparkly and alive. I think there’s a visual aesthetic, but [also] emotional tether that demanded that direction with the look and the feel.

It’s funny that you say it’s easy to model textures because I’m learning Blender and I’m having the hardest time.

If you were to get trained in 3D, you would learn how to do all that stuff super well. I took a class once and I didn’t really do well.

I didn’t like it. I just skip over all the hard stuff. There’s a limitation in working with 3D, especially if you’re not someone that’s interested in spending two months getting into the math and the geometry. I’ve never been interested in that. I found you don’t really need to be. I work in Cinema 4D, which is very similar to Blender. You could use either.

I just click around on the default settings of texture application. And I like to cycle between cubic and projection and spherical. I just wait for something to look right. Working more stylized, you don’t really need to get into all that.

I think there’s a proper way to work in animation. And that proper way requires typically 10 different departments of big teams of people all working on stuff. As an expressive independent artist, I get a lot of kids that message me and they want to learn 3D.

It’s so overwhelming because it’s [the] kind of … industry that is built with a lot of team members, people who specialize in different skills.

I think if you have something that you’re wanting to express or make and you have a program like Cinema 4D, you just keep molding it and playing [with] it and you find your own way through. And that just creates a much more special result.

I would not survive if I got hired to do animation on a movie that was doing 3D animation.

Geometry nodes are killing me.

I love the idea of someone being really into the math of it. I would love to meet her. I bet she makes some cool stuff. I got into art because I was like, I’ll never have to do math again.

It’s kind of like painting. If you were to learn painting, you’d probably have to go study 15th, 16th-century modern and postmodern techniques, acrylics, oils. And if you just follow that way to do it, yeah, you’re painting, but like, so is everyone else. What are you really doing? But, if you let your spirit guide you somewhere else, who knows what you’ll end up doing.

The music choices you make seem really intentional in the snippets you post. It seems like it’s very much part of the process for you, and not an afterthought.

I’ve tried to plan an animation and animate it, and then I’ll look for the right song and edit it. It gets so forced and it doesn’t feel right.

I just want to see my character Mary waiting at the bus, just listening to music while I’m working. I constantly listen to new music and save it to a playlist. A lot of people have been asking me for my playlist, which I do want to release at some point. But every song I’m responding to gets put into a playlist based on film ideas I have. So there’s a “Witch from Portsmith” playlist that I just am constantly filling with everything that’s really hitting for me and hitting that same black sparkly pavement feeling.

So that music is bringing me there. I have a fairy one, I have a sci-fi one. I have a New York City one. A million little playlists. And then when I want to work on an animation, I’ll go through my playlist.

I’ll see if anything’s hitting that idea or sketch I have of an animation. And then I like to animate to the sound. Like collaborating with the artist, even though they’re not involved.

Then I’m in conversation with it. And we’re trying to hold onto that as we’re getting into production on our miniseries and starting to work with voice talent and our actresses and other collaborators. I really want to maintain that dance between a sound artist who is using their voice and expression and allowing room for them to really bring something that I can respond to rather than blocking out a scene to the nth degree.

We really try to allow there to be some improv, but it’s more about allowing things to come up and embracing it and working with it.

Tell me more about your new series.

We’re working on a little miniseries. Mary and everything that we’ve been working on has lived on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. So I think it’s important to us … to keep it there.

We’ve developed a really sweet community of mostly girls. So the next evolution of the project, it definitely makes sense to keep it online for now, right where everyone can access it, you know?

It sounds like you’re not only animating all of this, but directing as well.

Yeah, I currently am doing basically everything. I’m writing it. I will be directing it. I’m animating everything right now, designing all the parts of it, which can be a lot. If it’s ever too much, then I step back and I re-approach the work by evaluating what am I trying to say and how can I do this in a way that feels easy, that feels true and evocative.

So yeah, currently wearing every single hat, except for my creative partner, Cath Daly, who’s my producer, who has taught me what a producer really is. They are the foundational protection around the project that is constantly requiring the work to stay true to itself. They’ve been such a necessary and important part of the creative development of the series.

I think as we go along, we’re still in pre-production. As we get along into production, we’re going to continue looking for opportunities to collaborate with artists, but coming from the place of a true creative relationship rather than trying to book artists to do animation or X, Y, or Z, you know?

I also really, really want to get into live action. I could just totally see the world translating over to a live-action universe, in a really exciting way. That’s definitely something I’m super curious about.

Have you ever made a live-action film?

Well, I actually have experimented a lot with live action, but predominantly doing music videos for my own musical projects … throughout the years.

I’ve always made music. It’s not something I release or promote, but it’s just part of my expressive practice. So I’ve had a few, you know, little videos I’ve made through the years.

They’re developed in a very similar way to my animation. Typically I’m shooting myself on a green screen or a white screen or just a seamless backdrop. Then I bring it into After Effects and expand out the emotional universe of it with whatever I have, usually blocks of color that I’ll mask out and then blur and add some grain. So I would love to continue developing that.

I wish I had five of me. I get so overwhelmed because I have so many things I want to make. But I think that will just take time.

Is there any part of your process that involves using AI?

Actually, no, we haven’t really used any AI. I was actually thinking about AI this morning, and I was wondering why we don’t use AI. Obviously, there’s moral and environmental parts to it. But AI is all about having no limitations. You can do anything, you can make anything. And I think my work and my relationship to fantasy has always been about having limitations. Even just from being a kid and wanting more out of my life — something different.

That was a limitation and demanded fantasy out of the way I was processing the world around me. And in my creative practice now, I still work that way. I have limitations with my computer that doesn’t even have good RAM or a CPU.

When I get error messages, I reduce the file sizes. I reduce how I’m working. I make it lighter.

I’m embracing the limitation. And the fantasy that comes out of that is so beautiful to me. So I’m not currently having any chemistry with AI or interest in it.

I know it’s a hot topic in the industry and I’m not in that conversation right now. But we’ll see if that ever changes, you know.

I work in post-production as well. I do creative direction and stuff. With the work we have online, we’ve talked to some different studios about potentially collaborating and getting production support on the series. These tech bros who are higher-ups in these different agency companies that are working in film, so excited about AI. When I talk to them, they’re just so focused on the tool. It’s just boring to me.

People are not responding to my work online because it’s made with a computer. They’re responding to it because I’m exploring a very specific relationship to femininity. And all the girls that are online know it well and there’s something beautiful there.

Being really into tools is also cool. I really want to find those people that I can work with because I’m never going to be that person. So, yeah, no shade against the baddies in STEM. We love the baddies in STEM.

Is there anything that you want to make a note of?

There is more Mary coming. We’re working on it every day.

I wake up and I think about it and my producer thinks about it every night before they go to sleep. We’re working on it and it’s going to be so amazing and beautiful.

Why I love my Brother 1034D Serger

2025-05-30T09:34:56-04:00

Cath Virginia is the senior designer here at The Verge, who creates illustrations and collages for our articles. However, she also has “dabbled” (as she puts it) in feature designs for articles such as 2004 was the first year of the future (which won the 2025 ASME Award for Best News and Entertainment Design), How the Stream Deck rose from the ashes of a legendary keyboard, and The Lurker. “I also designed the branding for Notepad by Tom Warren and recently refreshed the look of Verge Deals,” she explains.

When not doing this impressive work, Cath sews. A lot. And so, when I asked her what one of her favorite gadgets was, she said it was her Brother 1034D Serger. If you’re not quite sure what a serger is (I certainly wasn’t), read on.

What exactly is a thread serger?

A serger, also known as an overlocker, is a type of sewing machine generally used in apparel making. It has two needles and uses up to four strands of thread at a time to create the loops and finished edge you see on the inside of most knitwear, like T-shirts and leggings. It also has a knife that cuts the edge of your fabric at the same time, so the finished product looks clean and professional.

When did you buy this one, and what went into the decision?

I bought this one this past March as a birthday and tax return present. I’ve been wanting one for a while, because I sew a lot of clothes. I’m picky about style and, being fat, have a hard time finding clothes I like that actually fit me. I also love wearing knits because they’re comfortable, and traditional sewing machines aren’t intended primarily to sew knit garments, which need to have stretchy seams. You can use a zigzag stitch to achieve a stretch in your seam, but the serger sews and cuts all at once, as well as finishes the inside edges, so it saves a lot of time.

In choosing a serger, I wanted one that was easy to thread, had an adjustable free arm for sewing cuffs and sleeves, and could sew multiple layers of fabric at a time. I watched a bunch of YouTube reviews of sergers and found this one to be pretty affordable — and it checked my boxes. It also got better reviews than its cheaper sibling, the DX. I was intimidated by it at first because four spools of thread is kind of scary. But it has clearly labeled and color-coded instructions for threading and comes with a manual, so I learned it and had it down in under half an hour.

The serger creates a chain of stitches called “overlocking” that goes along the inside edge of your garment and can also be used for decoration.

| Photo: Cath Virginia / The Verge" data-portal-copyright="Photo: Cath Virginia / The Verge" />

What do you usually create with it?

So far, I have hemmed a couple shirts and made a maxi skirt (with pockets!) and a crop top. That was after a long and frustrating period trying to learn how to use it. I also dulled two different knives, learning that you can’t sew over pins with a serger because there is a big metal knife chopping your seam off.

What do you like about it?

Sometimes when you’re sewing knits on a traditional (lockstitch) machine, the edges become unintentionally ruffle-y (due to its one measly feed dog, which is the moveable plate that pulls the material through from stitch to stitch). This can make your piece look pretty weird and bad. Another great thing about this serger is that it has something called differential feed, which uses two feed dogs to sew your fabric together. It can be adjusted to feed one piece of fabric faster or slower, so it will flatten out your wobbly knitted seams or can be used to create a lettuce hem. It also comes with a gathering foot, which can be used to gather and sew (intentional) ruffles!

Is there anything about it that you dislike or that you think could be improved?

This is actually on me for not doing quite enough research, but when I bought it, I was excited to finally be able to do the coveted two-thread coverstitch you see on the hems of T-shirts and other knit stuff, only to find out you actually need a whole other machine that literally only does that one thing. That was disappointing to find out, but to compensate, the serger does actually come with a blind hem foot that you can use to do an okay impression of one. It’s kind of a finicky stitch to get right, though, because you’re sewing from the wrong side of the fabric, and I had to do quite a few samples to test it out before I used it on any garments.

Who would you recommend it to?

If you sew a lot of knitwear clothing, it can be a really useful tool for leveling up your garments and being a bit more efficient! It’s not a total replacement for a lockstitch sewing machine but I’m really liking it so far. Don’t be too intimidated by the four threads: they are your friends. And don’t try to sew over any of your pins.

Brother 1034D 3/4 Thread Serger

Designed for finishing the edges and hems of a wide range of fabrics, especially linens and stretchy fabrics, and for creating ruffles and decorative edges.

Where to Buy:

What lies beneath: filming gators in Florida springs

2025-05-09T15:13:11-04:00

If you’re like me, you’ve been anxiously searching for any relief from the Bad News™ and endless stream of AI slop plaguing your feed. Joseph Ricketts’ breathtaking wildlife videos could be the antidote. An alligator taking a nap on the floor of a crystal clear spring. Schools of fish glittering in the darkness. A cosmic cloud of burnt orange tannic river swirling into clear blue water. A giant salamander battle on an Appalachian riverbed.

Joseph is an ecologist, underwater videographer, and alligator researcher based in Florida. He brings a calming and curious gaze to some of the more obscure underwater vistas through his work as a scientist and wildlife researcher, with his photography and videography skills. With his undersea strobes, he casts light on the mesmerizing behavior of some of the more obscure creatures that lurk below the water’s surface, creating beautiful videos while educating his audience on the vulnerable wildlife he finds there. Documenting Florida’s natural springs and America’s freshwater ecosystems has become a passion project. The Verge caught up with him to learn about his fascinating YouTube content.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Science or photography first?

It would probably be photography first. Actually, I got into wildlife and animals as a kid. There was a creek in a park near our house and we found bullfrog tadpoles in there and they were really big. That just blew my mind and set me on the path of being interested in wildlife. My dad got a camera at some point and on some family trips I would use it and got really interested in it. All of that together led to me getting interested in science and then conservation, storytelling, and wildlife filmmaking.

How did you get involved with ecology?

I was in Boy Scouts as a kid and there was another kid in our group who was really into snakes. I also grew up watching Steve Irwin, who was a huge hero of mine.

Growing up in the Southeast, people have very strong feelings about snakes. They do not like them — especially the venomous ones. It was neat to watch Steve Irwin and the way that he approached all sorts of animals, no matter how dangerous they were, with immense joy and curiosity. To see someone in my own community also be interested in that, it was like, “I can do this too.”

And then, learning to love these animals but still seeing a lot of people who just wanted all of them eliminated from the environment. Even when I was young, I was thinking: what does it mean to protect these animals and what does it mean to encourage other people to change their mindset? How do you justify protecting and conserving an animal that might be potentially dangerous? What about the environmental importance of predators? I was so interested and passionate, I ended up studying conservation science in undergraduate and grad school.

A manatee takes shelter on a cold, winter morning in the (relatively) warm waters of a Florida freshwater spring. | Photo: Joseph Ricketts" data-portal-copyright="Photo: Joseph Ricketts" />

And you now specialize in alligators?

A lot of my professional work has been with reptiles and amphibians. Currently I am studying alligators and crocodiles.

What specifically are you researching?

We monitor alligator populations. I’ve helped out with some projects on American crocodiles, which are a native threatened species in Florida. One project I helped with was putting satellite transmitters on crocodiles we captured and monitoring their movements through urban areas in South Florida. The goal of that project was to get a better idea of their behavior in those highly urban environments because they move quite a bit. They have very variable home ranges. Some can be in a really small area, but then sometimes they’ll just up and go for a 20-mile swim to somewhere else entirely. The goal is to learn how to better cultivate safe coexistence with these animals in such a dense and highly populated area such as South Florida.

How did you start getting into underwater filming?

I first started out with a GoPro, because it’s a very accessible and not too expensive way to get a camera underwater. In college, my roommates and friends always tried to go on some kind of adventure during spring break. We were super fascinated with the idea of snorkeling in clear water, because that wasn’t something that was around us where we grew up. So every spring break we drove down to Florida. We snorkeled in the Keys and discovered Florida’s springs along some of those trips.

I would take photos with the GoPro, even though it’s not really meant for that. But underwater photography equipment is really expensive and I just thought, “There’s no way, I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to afford that.”

But then after my wife and I graduated, we got married, lived in North Carolina for a little while, and then, because she’s originally from Pensacola, Florida, we moved back. I got a job doing some ecology work here in Gainesville.

One day I was just cruising around Facebook Marketplace and I saw a camera housing made to fit a 20-year-old camera that was within millimeters of the size of my camera. It was a tenth of the price of what an average full kit cost. So I got it. I had to make some modifications and I actually used Lego pieces to make some of the controls fit my camera. I had pretty limited control underwater, but I could do auto ISO, and then control the aperture and the shutter speed, and pull the trigger to get a shot. When I did video, I had to start recording, put the camera in the housing, close it, and then I couldn’t do anything else. It would just be one single shot the whole time. So it wasn’t great for video, but that’s how I got started. And then I realized I was a pretty decent wildlife photographer.

I took some photos and I got shortlisted in some pretty major international competitions. I didn’t push through to be a finalist, but it was enough to be, “I actually have some skill in this and it’s worth pursuing.” It just kind of kept building up from there. Eventually I got another used housing that was designed for my camera. By that point, I was selling prints and doing some other things, so I was able to finally fully upgrade my kit to where I’m at now.

An American alligator floats down to the bottom of a freshwater spring after grabbing a breath. This was taken at night. | Photo: Joseph Ricketts" data-portal-copyright="Photo: Joseph Ricketts" />

What kind of tech is in your diving kit?

I’m using the Canon R5 with a Canon EF-RF adapter and a Canon EF 8-15mm f/4 L fish-eye lens. It’s a super wide-angle lens that people tend to use either for underwater or for skateboard photography. It’s a little weird because everything’s a little distorted and kind of rounded, but when you’re underwater, it’s really great for taking photos that just kind of immerse you in that system. You can focus extremely close to your subject. You can be an inch away and still focus on it. Since the angle is so wide, you can lock in on the eye of the wildlife and kind of capture their face, but also the rest of the scene and their entire body, even if it’s a bigger animal.

I use an Ikelite 200DL Dive Housing, and I’ve got two Sea & Sea YS-90DX strobes and two 2900 VTL BigBlue Dive Lights. The strobes connect to the camera so that when you pull the trigger, it lets off some light, because the deeper you go underwater, light tends to fade pretty quickly and that little flash of white light just kind of restores color to the scene.

I also have an Ikelite 8-inch Dome Port with an extension that is wide enough so that the super-wide fish-eye lens doesn’t get cut off by the design of the dive housing. If you hold it right on the surface it can create a water line so you can get split shots.

I use Lightroom and Photoshop for editing photos and making prints. I use Premiere Pro for editing videos.

How do you decide what you’re going to film?

I have to find an idea that is interesting to me. Sometimes it’s a story that I think needs to be told, and that I feel qualified with the knowledge to do it. I need to know the location and be confident that I can get the shots I need safely. I also want to feel capable of telling the story in a meaningful way.

Science and wildlife are such huge subjects. It’s hard. There’s a lot of people that tend to tout themselves as wildlife experts, but unless they’re very, very experienced, that raises a red flag. I wouldn’t describe myself as that. I have to do a lot of research myself and I learn things along the way too.

I’m really passionate about anything aquatic because I love doing underwater photography and videography. That’s the main part of my social media and YouTube channel. I especially love showing people unique environments where you wouldn’t tend to think about what life looks like underwater. I think about what wildlife I might encounter there, and what conservation story I can weave through that. Also, is there enough visibility in the water for me to get my camera in and actually get usable shots that people can connect with?

There’s a disconnect that exists between people and wildlife in the natural world that we have to actively combat, like climate change, pollution, and habitat destruction. There’s another disconnect between us and what lies beneath the surface, and I really want to do what I can to bridge that gap. It’s important that people put faces to the creatures that live in these places, no matter how big or how small they are. They’re all important, wonderful, worth learning and worth caring about. Aquatic ecosystems are very sensitive environments. It’s important to know what’s there, to know what we might stand to lose.

Do you have a story in mind before you dive, or do you usually piece things together after?

I love photography and being able to tell a story through a single image, but I also love longer forms, using video to tell stories as well.

My creative process is definitely evolving. I’ll have the beginnings of an idea while I’m trying to work out the storytelling and trying to find ways to help people connect to it. Typically I’ll have an idea of the area I want to cover for the shot and what I’m going to focus on. One example was trying to find a very specific species of very tiny fish that lives in springs.

A fully colored-up male Gulf Coast pygmy sunfish keeps a careful eye out for intruders while guarding its tiny territory at the edge of a Florida freshwater spring. | Photo: Joseph Ricketts" data-portal-copyright="Photo: Joseph Ricketts" />

That Gulf Coast pygmy sunfish is a beautiful fish.

They’re so cool. So my idea was that it’s going to be about finding that fish, filming it, hopefully getting some behavior. That was about what I had to work with, and I was lucky enough to see quite a bit of behavior.

After I get the footage all edited down to the best clips and have a general concept of a story, that’s when I’ll write the script. Writing the script last is not normal for most creators, but I want the adventure and the action of going out and snorkeling, exploring these places, to be the heart of the channel. Sometimes I might have a little bit more script on certain parts, but normally I don’t have any control over what I’m going to see. So I have to go out and shoot, and then come back and do the story from that.

What are the biggest challenges that you’re trying to work through?

A big challenge is sustainability and how I can be consistent and not burn out, because it is a lot of work, going out to explore and dive, sometimes not having a lot of success and other times having success. How do I pace myself? I think I’ve kind of settled on a pretty decent schedule.

Another challenge is that a lot of YouTube is shock value and clickbait. I want to use my channel to push back against that. The algorithm seems to be changing to entertain longer attention spans and boost authentic and real content. But I want to be able to use my channel to help people appreciate even little details and small things.

Like if you go snorkeling and you’re in the ocean or on a reef, obviously the really big things like the sharks and huge rays are going to be what stand out to you. But if you’re in a tiny pond and there’s nothing around, and then you find one living thing, suddenly that thing becomes really interesting. I want to be able to tell stories about some of the less exciting things and make those interesting.

Such as the video you made about Appalachian Hellbenders. I never imagined salamanders would duke it out like that. Do you like being based in Florida?

It’s great, but in a lot of ways it’s hard and frustrating, too. Florida has some absolutely amazing wildlife and amazing ecosystems, and as an underwater photographer, it’s a great place to be. There’s the coasts, the Keys, freshwater springs, rivers and streams as well. There are a lot of places that are within reasonable driving distance to find underwater adventures and stories to tell. It’s frustrating because there’s so much to lose and Florida is also developing at a very unsustainable rate. There are new developments going up everywhere. A lot of spots I love are degrading. I’ve been going to the springs since college and some of them are almost unrecognizable from when I first visited them 10 years ago. It’s an issue globally and definitely around the US, but I think Florida is experiencing that at an accelerated rate.

It’s a good place to be as a conservationist because there’s lots of work to be done, messages to get out there, but it can be draining and exhausting. Sometimes [you] feel like you’re fighting an uphill battle with no breaks or rest.

Sounds like politics combined with being a tourist and retirement destination.

A huge problem is that people are moving here and not taking the time to learn about the natural community that exists prior to their arrival. So people move here and are surprised to see an alligator in their backyard. Or other really wealthy people move to South Florida and have crocodiles around, and they freak out because that’s totally new to them. But this is Florida. We have venomous snakes, we have alligators, we have crocodiles. They belong here. They’re important for this ecosystem. If you can’t embrace that, then I don’t know what you’re expecting.

There are plenty of ways to learn to safely live alongside these creatures. There’s just a huge need to meet the influx of new people with education and reminding people that we want Florida to remain wild. So much of the appeal of Florida is its natural environment and so there’s plenty of reasons why it needs to be protected, but it is kind of a constant battle.

I love Florida so much. It’s such a beautiful place, an important place to protect, but it has a ton of challenges facing it.

A river cooter paddles off into the confluence where the blue-green water of freshwater spring swirls with the tannic water of a nearby river. | Photo: Joseph Ricketts" data-portal-copyright="Photo: Joseph Ricketts" />

Are there any spots that you really want to dive into that you haven’t had the chance to yet?

Because a lot of my stuff is Florida-based, I would really love to do a series of diving in every single state in the US. Some of that would be more predictable, like diving off the coast of Maine. That’d be cool. But though you never hear of anyone going to Nebraska or Oklahoma to snorkel, there’s underwater stories to be told there and I would love the chance to do that. So I’m hoping if the channel grows enough, there’ll be interest enough from the audience to support something like that.

Of course I would absolutely love to travel internationally to do some videos as well. I think that’s something I would need to earn, because there are definitely other people who might be more qualified to tell some of those stories. But I think if my channel [followers] were interested and wanted me to, I would absolutely love the chance to do that. There are a lot of freshwater springs around the world.

Any closing thoughts?

I just hope that I can continue to inspire people to be kind and curious about the world around them and pay attention to the little things. It’s important to be mindful of our individual impacts on the world around us, but also to hold ourselves as a community and as a country to a higher standard as far as protecting our natural resources and our wildlife, because we don’t get a second chance at this. It’s important that we take it seriously and we get it right.

I think it’s hard to learn to love something if you don’t know that that thing exists or haven’t been able to see it in its home. So I hope that my underwater videos can help people to get a glimpse into those underwater worlds to see that they’re places that are really special, worth protecting, and worth keeping wild.

During one of many stops on a long journey through Florida’s Panhandle, Joseph Ricketts swims through a remote spring, its waters tangled with tree roots, limbs, and dense algae growth. | Photo: Nick Conzone" data-portal-copyright="Photo: Nick Conzone" />

How one creator visualized AI by using very little AI

2024-12-05T08:30:00-05:00

Stormy Pyeatte is a UK-based video and photo artist who works with practical effects and projection mapping. The design team here at The Verge worked with her to create the evocative visuals in “Friend or Faux?” — a story layered with ethical and philosophical questions about the newly unfolding relationships some people have with AI chatbots.

I stumbled upon Pyeatte’s work on Instagram one day when I was scrolling mindlessly through the feed — and it stopped me in my tracks. Because the tech we report on is always changing, I am constantly on the lookout for innovative ways of creating visuals for our site. I was blown away by how otherworldly her work is. Through stunning set design, ethereal lighting setups, and dreamlike projection mapping, it has been a thrill to be handed such mesmerizing (and unsettling) visual solutions. Much like the AI tech at the focus of the piece, the videos draw the viewer in with a lilting mystique, while also suggesting the very human complexity inherent in this fascinating story.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you get started working with floral photography and projection mapping?

I first became interested in projection in 2013 during college when I interned with Daniel Brodie, a projection designer on the Broadway production of Motown: The Musical. It was such a fantastic experience seeing how projections work in theater, though, back then, I didn’t have my own projector to experiment with, and it would be many, many years until I got my hands on one.

After graduating college in 2014, I found myself living in a hostel in San Francisco, working in exchange for a bed because I couldn’t afford rent. It sounds drab, but honestly, it was one of the best experiences of my life! I didn’t plan to live there. I kind of said yes to a road trip and ended up in San Francisco. Hostel life was so much fun, but I really wanted to do something creative. Luckily, Daniel introduced me to Bradley G. Munkowitz (GMUNK), who then introduced me to a few people, including an artist and friend Conor Grebel. Conor is an incredible artist, and at the time, I didn’t realize it, but he was a mentor to me. I would help out on his projects, which were all about experimenting with projection and practical effects. All of these projects were self-funded passion projects. Watching him and everyone work taught me how to embrace creating just for the joy of it.

It’s funny looking back now because I was broke and a bit aimless, but those projects — and the people who supported me — gave me so much inspiration. They would encourage me to come up with ideas and share them, though, at the time, I had few ideas or opinions of my own. They would go so far as to cover my dinners and rides back to the hostel after shoots because they knew I was a super broke recent grad artist who had something to offer but didn’t quite know what that thing was yet. That kindness and inclusion left a huge impression on me.

Around that same time, I also started working in floristry. I’d set this naive goal for myself to only make money doing “something creative,” which meant that, in reality, I was really effing broke and had to get resourceful. Growing up, I’d always loved flowers because of my mom, who was a gardener, so I figured, why not try floristry? That’s creative and that counts! So, over the next seven years, I worked in retail, luxury, and event floristry across the US, New Zealand, and Australia.

While traveling and working in floristry, I always envisioned marrying projection and floral design together, but it wasn’t until 2020 that I finally got my hands on a projector and some basic lighting gear. Once the covid-19 pandemic hit, I just threw myself into experimenting. Having the time and tools to play around was a turning point for me, and it was when I finally could play around with the things I was picturing in my head.

How did you create the visual concepts for the “Friend or Faux?” feature? What was your thought process?

After reading the draft of “Friend or Faux?” I pulled out a few themes that felt compelling to explore visually: love and adoration; intangibility and separation; fragmentation and fragility; and grief and anxiety. I then started brainstorming how each of these themes could be expressed in a visual, tangible way.

One of my biggest inspirations was thinking about the feeling you get when you’re crushing on someone so hard you can’t think straight. You’re not really seeing them clearly — you’re fixated on an idealized version of them, almost like looking through rose-tinted glasses. I wanted to bring that feeling to life by creating a surreal floral world that felt obsessive and dreamy, like you’re having “flowery tunnel vision.” It’s about being more in love with the idea of someone than with who they truly are.

For one of the images, I drew inspiration from Tracey Emin’s My Bed, her messy bed installation from the ’90s. To me, a bed is such a personal space — where you sleep but also where you lie awake, letting your thoughts and fantasies run wild. As a kid, I remember staying up late, talking to crushes on the phone, and I wanted to channel that mix of intimacy and imagination. Projecting the AI companion onto a messy bed felt like a poignant way to contrast the humanness of needing to sleep with the intangibility of the AI.

A lot of your work leans into either the artistic (and is, I assume, personally driven) or the product-based, for advertising. How has your experience working with this story been?

This is actually my first-ever editorial piece! So it was definitely a new experience for me. And yes, my work typically falls into two categories: personal and commercial.

With personal work, my goal is always to explore something new or create just for the sake of creating. I think of 80 percent of the stuff I post online as the same as sketching in a sketchbook. It’s just making something for practice or to try something new. It’s really about entertainment and experimentation — letting myself play and see where that leads or trying out a new technique or something I’m learning about.

When I’m doing product photography or videography, the focus is on storytelling through small sets and styling. I ask myself questions like, “What world does this product live in? Is it fun, surreal, or aspirational? How can I use lighting or composition to make someone think, Ooooh, ahhhh, I want to live there or smell those flowers? When working on commercial projects, I’m always thinking about the company’s ideal or existing customer. It’s often storytelling about what problem its product solves or creating an aspirational “vibe” its customer will likely identify with and creating visuals for that.

This project was different because I was thinking about the stories of the individuals featured and how this technology is impacting people on a personal level, the people close to them, and how it is likely impacting others right now. So I just naturally started slipping into thoughts about my past and reflecting on my own life and experiences, and that was my biggest inspiration.

I was thinking a lot about my early 20s, when I was dating and would have very intense and often very fleeting romances. For this project, I spent a lot of time remembering what it’s like to have a crush on someone and how intoxicating and consuming it can be. I also thought a lot about how it clouded my judgment. I remember moments when I was enamored with someone who, looking back, wasn’t actually so great. That “crushing” phase, — the obsession, the daydreaming, the inability to see things clearly — was the biggest inspiration for the visuals.

It’s funny because I’ve been with my partner for nine years now, so it’s been a long time since I’ve thought about those experiences! This project really reminded me, and I got to translate it in this cool way.

In terms of the technical side of things, not much changed. The physical building, the software, and the lighting techniques I used are the same as what I’d typically rely on. But the thought process and emotional connection behind this project were unique. It was about tapping into something more introspective and personal, rather than solving a problem or selling a product.

Can you tell us about the tech, including equipment and apps, that you used?

Before building the sets, I plan the animations I’ll need, deciding what to create in advance and what I can adjust on the fly during the shoot. For this project, we collaborated to design an AI companion featured throughout the visuals. You created the character [Note: I made a Kindroid.AI account and took many screen recordings], and I used Runway, an AI software, to bring her to life. Runway’s “image-to-video” functionality allowed me to upload the companion’s image and specify actions I wanted her to perform.

It was a tedious process, if I’m being totally honest. Like, it would be much easier and more fun to work with an actress. But we wouldn’t have gotten that “it looks human but it’s definitely not human” vibe without it. It was really cool, and I think very appropriate, to integrate AI into this project in this way. We used it to create a character that can be a visual representation of the chatbots discussed in the article. There were times when the Runway got it totally wrong, like her eyes went completely white and looked so weird in one clip, so I downloaded it and used it for one of the visuals where the idea was to convey how sometimes these chatbots totally glitch out.

Once I had the flowers from the market and allowed them time to open, I built the floral sets using standard florist tools: chicken wire; floral wire; agra wool; and my trusty secateurs. My video lighting equipment is all from Amaran, I used their 150C and 300C lights, with several different modifiers. My favorite modifier from them is the Spotlight SE. I used an Epson home / office projector for the projection mapping. I used MadMapper to map my animations and After Effects for some on-the-fly animating. For video editing, I used DaVinci Resolve.

What are your feelings about AI and what use, if any, did you make of AI tools to create the finished product?

In terms of the AI technology discussed in the article, I don’t judge what people do in their free time, but I do worry about how this technology can be used by nefarious people as a way to manipulate others and the emotionally vulnerable. The article definitely got me thinking about the anthropomorphization of technology and how it can actually be very, very dangerous. Working on this project has inspired one of my goals for 2025, which is to be more social and to get more involved in artistic communities.

I get kind of bored sitting in front of a computer all the time. I love to work with my hands and to touch and use different materials. No software — AI or otherwise — can replicate that feeling, so I will always integrate something physical into my practice.

But I see AI as a cool (and often very slow) tool that can be really beneficial. For this project, I used AI to create videos of the AI companion, combining them with footage I shot myself and using the results for projection mapping. Given the article’s subject matter, it’s an appropriate use of AI technology. I also use ChatGPT to support my writing (I once used it to create a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, which was so fun!), and I use Runway to create mock-ups of the visual ideas I see in my head. These have been game-changing for communicating and selling my ideas to clients. AI is fun. I’ll continue to use it when I find a need to.

I choose not to worry about how AI is going to impact me because a) I’m going to die one day, so I want to create and have fun while I’m here, and worrying about AI holds me back from focusing on doing creative work and b) it’s out of my control. I am choosing to focus on becoming a better creative and storyteller because that will always be useful, no matter what tools I am using.

For me, personally, if I’m buying a painting, I prefer the one painted by a human, not the one prompted by a person to be made by a machine. I really value traditional art forms and see the process of how something is made as important (maybe more) than the art itself. I see value in not just the final artwork but the entire journey that incredible artist went through to develop that thinking and skill set. It inspires me when I look at it.

With AI tech in creativity, I suspect that the people who will be the best at using AI tools are going to be people who already have rich artistic practices of their own and are well versed in art and the creative history of the past. My college professor used to say, “garbage in, garbage out.” If your script is garbage, your film will be garbage, and no amount of cutting-edge tech can save it. But if your ideas and your taste are good, it will cut through, even if the resources you have at your disposal are super minimal. AI tools are great for amplifying good ideas and supporting people with good taste — they’re not a shortcut to creativity but an extension of it.

Mona Chalabi on storytelling, the power of data, and covering Palestine

2024-03-11T10:30:00-04:00

Every month, The Verge’s designers, photographers, and illustrators gather to share the work of artists who inspire us. Now, we’re turning our Art Club into an interview series in which we catch up with the artists and designers we admire and find out what drives them.

A bloodied press jacket. A body shrouded in white. Families with linked hands walking with all they can carry on their backs. These are the images that Mona Chalabi uses to create harrowing and biting infographics about atrocities in Gaza.

Chalabi won a Pulitzer for her in-depth reporting and inimitably clever data viz on Jeff Bezos’s wealth, but she got her start doing statistics at the UN. Her media career has been many-faceted — a column at 538, a podcast, a Ted Talk, and a TV show. Much of her online presence is now devoted to spreading awareness on the subject of Palestine, all through the same medium of fastidiously researched statistics paired with her signature style of hand-drawn ink lines and color-blocked design.

I caught up with her to talk about the storytelling power of hard numbers, the poetic way she expresses the global power imbalances she seeks to draw attention to, and the anxiety of striving to be as accurate as possible.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Posted on January 8th, 2024. | Graphic: Mona Chalabi" data-portal-copyright="Graphic: Mona Chalabi" />

What has it been like to post the work that you’ve made about Palestine on social media?

It’s been really hard. It’s been hard because I know why a lot of the people that I follow are remaining utterly silent, because there are consequences to you talking on this subject, both in your personal life and your professional life. But I’m holding the work to the exact same standard as I do any other piece that I do: is this the truth? Is this accurate to the best of our current knowledge of what the situation is, and does it help to further the conversation? You know, there’s also so much work the other journalists are doing. I don’t really believe in just duplicating, I want to say something additive. And I’m trying to set aside the downsides for me personally and just continue to do the work.

Do people label you an activist?

I think the question only ever comes up in interviews. For most people who consume information or consume artwork or consume whatever, they don’t tend to be so hung up on definitions as the people that are writing about it. I don’t think people who follow me necessarily care whether or not I would describe myself as an activist. All that matters is that I’m producing information on whether or not it’s accurate.

Your work is very poetic and very good at expressing scale and magnitude. Can you talk a little bit about the ideation process that you use to create the recent work that you’ve been making?

Yeah. It’s not a thought process that’s different from the same thought process that I’ve used throughout all of my work. As you say, it’s about magnitude. It’s about scale.

Part of the story is asking, how does this point in time compare to the rest of history? How does this part of geography compare to a larger geography?

My process for finding questions involves reading existing coverage and thinking, what isn’t being said here? So I’ll be reading existing news coverage, but also taking questions from people who are writing to me directly or conversations I’m having with other people around me.

This is a longstanding practice. That was exactly the case when I was covering covid. It was the case when I was covering the protests that were happening after George Floyd’s murder. Every election that I’ve looked at, I ask, what do we get? What do we get by zooming out? How do we understand the world differently?

The thing that I’m really concerned about is how to zoom out without losing the humanity. I think there’s something really important actually about hearing what’s happening to, for example, Brenda in Queens, hearing her individual story. Even if the data suggests that her experience is actually quite rare, that’s not a reason to not listen to Brenda. So maybe Brenda is saying, “My experience of becoming a teen parent was phenomenal. It was really, really good for me to put my life on track. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.” And there’s this survey data that shows for 70 percent of teen parents, that’s not the case.

What concerns me sometimes is the way a reader can get to 70 percent after something gets rounded up to a hundred. The 30 percent gets lost in the narrative so easily. I don’t want to do that thing that data so often does, which is just flattening out everybody’s experiences.

Can you talk a little more about that?

Yeah. So more often than not it’s asking, what does the data say? Everyone’s talking about funding cuts at UNRWA. But what does it mean to say the US has cut X million dollars? That doesn’t mean anything unless you understand UNRWA’s total budget. Unless you understand the other donors and which ones have backed out. And the total budget only makes sense if you understand it in the context of how many people in Gaza rely on it to survive.

So what are all of those numbers? Then on the basis of those numbers, what is a visualization that makes sense? This is something I’m trying to think through right now. And I move so much slower now.

Like five years ago, I was trying to do a piece in a few hours the day of, and now I’m just like, no, I’m going to take a few days and I’m still working the same number of hours each day. There’s no change in the intensity, just a more cautious approach. There’s a slower pace of working. And so, again, what is the visualization that I’m going to use? How will I show how cruel this funding cut is?

The illustration that I would have used in the past would be something that symbolizes what UNRWA is providing —If it’s tents or food — and then disappearing out. What fraction of that is now going to be lost now that that funding is gone? It’s really hard in these early stages. A really key part of any illustration is finding the correct visual language for this. For the most sensitive subjects, when I’m talking about, for example, homicide rates or domestic violence, the same playfulness that I use in other areas of my work doesn’t make sense. What is the visual language for domestic violence? Often I start with a Google image search and look through the stock imagery it pulls up. Alamy and Getty stock is always a woman for domestic violence, usually sitting down, hugging her knees, the same visual language. It’s immediate and it’s quick to understand, which is important, because I need it to have that kind of speed. But it also perpetuates all of our lazy existing tropes.

We see this all the time with gender. If I’m going to show men and women, which unfortunately is very often all that exists in the dataset, I’m going to pick them in a way that isn’t lazily, reinforcing ‘a woman is anyone who wears a fucking dress and a man is anyone in trousers.’ It can be very hard to break out of our existing visual language in a way that isn’t confusing for viewers.

Posted on March 3rd, 2024. | Graphic: Mona Chalabi" data-portal-copyright="Graphic: Mona Chalabi" />

When people talk about posting anything that’s largely considered to be controversial for any reason, it seems like there’s some who experience a high increase in visibility on them. And then there’s the flip side, where increased visibility brings increased censorship on their work and reach. Do you feel like you’ve experienced either of those?

I don’t know. Maybe both. People have said their comments aren’t working. Other users are saying they’re being silenced or deplatformed. I haven’t said any of those things because I don’t know that they’re the case. And I think it’s quite a big thing to say, and you have to be certain that there’s a pattern that’s going on. The way that a lot of this stuff works, the algorithm is so opaque that you don’t really know which of those two trends is happening to you.

I would say, anecdotally, because I’ve posted on this long before October 7th… I think that the horrific violence on October 7th, for some people, shifted their understanding of the violence that was happening in Palestine. That happened in both directions. All of a sudden now, there was an opportunity to learn more about this conflict and understand its historical origins. And for other people, there was a reason actually to look away from it and be like, “Oh, it’s complicated,” and to me that’s kind of gross.

So basically, that’s a convoluted way of saying that on October 7th, I saw a big chunk of my followers immediately disappear in the first week after. And then I see over the four months since then, that number has leveled out and then increased over it as people have sought out information on Palestine.

I don’t even like describing it in those terms, because this isn’t really about me or my following.

Is there anything else you’d like to say about your work?

The thing that does feel really, really important to say is that I want to make sure my work on Palestine is contextualized in this broader framework of what I’ve always done.

There’s this assumption that I care about Palestine because I’m an Arab. I really want to contextualize it’s not based on identity. It fits into the broader body of my work, which is about how to inform people about marginalization in all of its forms.

As time goes on, this work is going to become really, really difficult for me. And I think, inevitably, because I’m not turning away from my work and because this conflict isn’t going anywhere, I’m going to end up covering other things.

The first time I cover something else, I don’t want people to think, “Oh, look, she’s sick of it now.” Even if you see me talking about other things, this hasn’t gone from my mind. Palestine has been on my mind for a long time, and it will continue to be on my mind. The reason why it’s on my mind is not because of identity politics. It’s because I care about marginalization.

It seems so clear after you won a Pulitzer for your reported work. It seems obvious that there is a lot of information to back up everything that you have to say.

It’s funny how a lot of people viewed me as a rigorous journalist on every other topic. And when it came to this, all of a sudden there was this disbelief in my method of research. There was this suspicion that all of a sudden it wasn’t rigorous. I think that really, really speaks to the very, very, very deeply entrenched biases that exist around this subject.

There’s this notion that Palestinian narratives are not as reliable and should be treated with caution. I hope that it’s finally kind of starting to shift a little bit.

AI at Work

2024-02-12T09:30:00-05:00

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AI, once an ambiguous science fiction trope, has become an ambiguous business buzzword, as every technology product races to implement what Silicon Valley thinks is the greatest innovation since the internet. But lost in the conversation are stories about the people building it and using it. If large language models and automated systems will, indeed, upend labor and capital, what does it actually look like in practice? In this package, we’ll explore the ways AI functions today: how people are using it, where it fails and where it succeeds, and what it actually means when we say “artificial intelligence.”

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