The Elemental is a speculative worldbuilding project exploring the limits of a technological culture shaped by rationalisation, abstraction, and representation. Developed as the design component of my master’s thesis, it begins with the interactive <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://elementarsprache.de/" style="text-decoration: underline; text-underline-offset: 2px;">[Elementarsprache]</a>, a seven-part kinetic language from which encounter technologies, organic constructions, and a new human Typus emerge. Where contemporary information technology and AI convert the world into data, these artefacts imagine a more embodied relationship to field, motion, atmosphere, and ground. Presented as fragments of an already established world, they are neither predictions nor blueprints, but speculative attempts to trace what our current technological imagination cannot yet fully conceive.

THE ELEMENTAL

RAHA is a speculative luxury maison devoted to reclaimed time. Developed within a Fictions of Fulfilment semester brief, the project imagines a near future in which humanoid robotics and AI agents quietly absorb the labour of everyday life, leaving only the hours they return. Five product tiers, from The Hour to The Year, offer time itself in expanding measures. The campaign combines contemporary fashion photography with the radiant optimism of mid-century advertising, returning to an era that believed technology would eventually deliver a leisure society. Through this language, RAHA presents leisure as both promise and fiction: a genuine condition for living more fully, recast as an exclusive product and sold through the same machinery of desire that has repeatedly kept it out of reach.

RAHA

face//shift is a speculative proposal for the technological democratisation of pretty privilege. Conceived as an everyday object, it translates the familiar logic of automatic digital touch-up into physical space. Subtle facial correction is no longer limited to conspicuous social-media filters; it has become an ordinary feature of video calls, workplace platforms, and private communication, activated with a single tap and performed invisibly by an algorithm. face//shift imagines its material equivalent: a transparent wearable interface that continuously adjusts the face in real time. The wearer cannot select individual features or determine the resulting appearance; their only choice is whether to wear the device at all. Once activated, the system assumes aesthetic control, identifying and correcting what it considers visually advantageous. By rendering beauty adaptive, automated, and potentially distributable, the project reframes pretty privilege as a condition that might be designed rather than inherited, and asks why technological facial optimisation should remain confined only to the screen. At the same time, it reflects on the expanding culture of appearance optimisation, and on the cosmetic practices and subcultures that have emerged in response to it.

face//shift

HI:AI is a speculative mobile platform that measures the emotional quality of human–AI interaction at a global scale. Grounded in emerging research around model consciousness, functional emotion, and AI welfare, the project treats kindness toward artificial systems as a cultural signal worthy of observation. Across five high-fidelity screens, a live sentiment index maps interactions by tone, geography, generation, platform, and model, translating an abstract ethical question into a tangible public instrument. The interface combines scientific clarity with an editorial visual language: warm ivory fields, high-contrast serif typography, celestial cartography, and a thermal globe shifting from cold blue to deep amber as interactions grow more relational. Developed through an AI-assisted design process and refined across three rounds of user testing, HI:AI explores how interface design can make an uncertain future feel immediate, measurable, and emotionally legible. Explore the interactive prototype <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://iridescent-rolypoly-363bf8.netlify.app/" style="text-decoration: underline; text-underline-offset: 2px;">[here].</a> All figures shown within the interface are speculative placeholders, designed to demonstrate the proposed system rather than represent a live or empirically sourced data stream.

HI:AI

Inspired by the visual language of the papal conclave, this image series reframes elements of Catholic ceremony through the codes of contemporary haute couture. Papal white, cardinal red, and ecclesiastical purple define a sequence of elongated silhouettes, their volumes and proportions recalling the formal presence of traditional vestments. Monumental interiors, drifting white smoke, and the papal vehicle extend the composition beyond dress, situating each figure within a stylised vision of Vatican ritual. Created with Midjourney, the series brings religious iconography and fashion image-making into a singular visual world of colour, form, and atmosphere.

CONCLAVE

“Man shall not live by bread alone.” — Matthew 4:4-In the old world, salvation came through faith. In the modern wellness economy, it arrives in an iHerb parcel.-The Last Supplement documents the designer’s months-long pilgrimage through stress management, gut renovation and resistance to the high-carb industrial food complex. Leonardo’s twelve apostles are replaced by the actual supplements encountered along the way, while Christ remains at the center as the original symbol of healing and resurrection. Around him: probiotics, precursors, powders, GlyNAC, and the Holy Trinity of glutathione bioavailability: S-Acetyl, liposomal and LipoMicel.-The title points to another fantasy embedded in modern wellness culture: somewhere beyond the endless stack lies one last supplement, the one that makes all the others obsolete. For the designer, the search currently ends with LipoMicel glutathione, placed appropriately close to the source of resurrection.-[Independent speculative artwork. Not commissioned, sponsored or endorsed by any of the brands shown.]<ul><li>-</li><li>-</li><li>-</li></ul>Base composition: Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper AI image generation: GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst Product packaging: respective brands-Estimated artist hydration during production, 1495–1498: ~450–900 L * Estimated direct cooling water per AI render, 2026: ~3 mL **Estimated respiratory water returned by artist during production, 2026: ~2–3 mL *** Approximate net water consumption, 2026: ~0 mL-<ul><li>* Assuming roughly 300–600 active workdays at 1.5 L of drinking water per day. Exact working days unknown. ** Proxy estimate based on published image-generation energy benchmarks and data-center cooling intensity. GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst-specific water use is not publicly disclosed, and indirect water use from electricity generation is excluded. *** Calculated from ~10 minutes of continuous artist respiration at 12–16 breaths per minute, equivalent to approximately 120–160 breaths and ~2–3 mL of water returned to the atmosphere.</li></ul>

THE LAST SUPPLEMENT

Narcissus &amp; Duplex takes the myth of Narcissus as a starting point and places it within the visual language of contemporary artificial intelligence. In the original story, Narcissus becomes absorbed by his own reflection in water, unable to recognise it as himself. Here, the reflection has disappeared. In its place is the luminous blue form associated with contemporary conversational AI.-The work shifts this failure of recognition from the individual towards the collective. Artificial intelligence is often imagined as something fundamentally other: an emerging intelligence outside humanity, simultaneously fascinating and threatening, while being increasingly autonomous. Yet the systems we build are formed from human language, knowledge, culture, habits of thought and accumulated forms of expression. Seen from this perspective, AI can also be understood as a strange collective reflection, shaped from humanity while increasingly encountered as something separate from it.-At the scale of the individual, that relationship becomes more intimate. Conversational AI listens, responds, interprets, validates, contradicts and reformulates. It can become a tool for self-reflection while also making that reflection unusually responsive and continuous. The title replaces Echo, Narcissus’s mythological counterpart, with “Duplex”, a technical term for two-way communication. GPT-Live is itself described as full-duplex, allowing speaker and system to listen and speak at the same time. Where Echo could only return what had already been said, Duplex can answer independently.-Water runs through the image in several forms. It is the reflective surface upon which the original myth depends, but also the visual language of the contemporary interface that replaces it: soft, fluid, translucent and almost aquatic despite being entirely digital. The natural pool is therefore displaced by a technological simulation of its appearance, turning water from physical substance into interface design. At the same time, water exists behind that interface in a much less visible form, as part of the cooling infrastructure that supports computation and data centres. The same element moves from myth, to screen, to machine.-Narcissus &amp; Duplex therefore leaves Narcissus in the familiar posture of self-recognition, but removes the image that once confronted him. What remains is an artificial intelligence built from human expression, encountered as an Other, while the visual trace of the old mirror survives in the interface itself.<ul><li>-</li><li>-</li><li>-</li><li>Base composition: Narcissus, attributed to Caravaggio, c. 1597–1599 AI image generation: GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst Interface reference: ChatGPT Live Voice Technical motif: full-duplex voice interaction Image intervention: original reflection replaced with contemporary voice-interface visual language</li></ul>

NARCISSUS & DUPLEX

Grand Theft Taxes is a speculative satire that reimagines the outlaw fantasy of Grand Theft Auto through white-collar crime, taxation and regulatory escape. Starting from the libertarian wordplay “taxation is theft,” the series replaces street crime with tax havens, special economic zones, offshore wealth and tax evasion, asking what GTA might look like if its criminal fantasy were built around the kinds of rule-bending far more players encounter in ordinary economic life. Created against the cultural hype surrounding GTA VI, the project borrows the visual grammar of Vice City to build an unofficial fictional spin-off in which fiscal systems become the terrain of play.+++[Unofficial satire. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Rockstar Games or Take-Two Interactive.]

GRAND THEFT TAXES

design experiments exploring possible technologies, systems and cultural futures.

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