Model-generated images / Through prompting and generation

Visions of the Devi

An encounter between the many forms of the Hindu Mother Goddess and the limits of a generative model. Prompts for fierce or ancient manifestations repeatedly returned youthful, benign figures, bringing the model’s constraints and cultural assumptions into view.

The Devi’s manifestations can be fierce and compassionate, ancient and youthful. In this series, the model repeatedly softened requests for fierceness and returned young figures. For the artist, these responses raise questions about the cultural assumptions and guardrails shaping what a model can imagine.

An ongoing study / the body over time

The body, revisited.

Visions of the Devi continues as a study of what a model can imagine—and how convincingly it can hold a body together. Revisiting an earlier manifestation makes the hands a point of comparison, while preserving the Devi’s intentional multiplicity of arms.

Earlier four-armed Devi seated before a lion, with tangled fingers in her lap — In the lap, fingers overlap into an uncertain hand structure. The four arms are intentional iconography.

2026 four-armed Devi before a lion, with separated palm-up hands and distinct human limbs and feline paws — Separated lower hands make the digits and wrists easier to read; the Devi’s limbs remain distinct from the lion’s paws.

02 / Where bodies meet

Earlier four-armed Devi with a foreground feline, where human feet and feline paws overlap ambiguously — At the base of the image, human feet and feline paws become difficult to distinguish.

Photographic 2026 Devi interpretation with four coherent arms, a distinct human foot, a separate panther, and the lion behind her — The Devi’s draped knee and the crouched panther have distinct outlines; tawny lion paws identify the larger body behind them.

The 2024 studies were made with the leading diffusion models of their time. The 2026 return belongs to a newer approach: image generation integrated with autoregressive language models. In these studies, greater anatomical coherence suggests how far that approach has advanced, while the earlier images retain a softness and atmosphere that can be aesthetically more compelling. Progress in coherence does not settle questions of taste.

The visual premise was reconstructed from the earlier image. The lower-hand pose was deliberately simplified, and the prompt explicitly requested coherent anatomy. A continuing artistic comparison, with changes in inputs and prompting as well as the model.

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