Anne Spalter
Generative 3D animation with sound
Elsewhere, Again uses AI interpretations of Anne Spalter's previous works to imagine a civilization that has outlived its inhabitants but not its code.
The work is an exercise in world building: a simulation that keeps running whether or not anyone is watching. It belongs to the end-times thinking that runs through Spalter's work, from her AI-generated landscapes to her paintings of machines adrift in the sky. Here the apocalypse repeats. The world ends, its machines put it back together, and it ends again, a little different each time.
Sound on.
The work runs in a cycle of four acts, 2 minutes 12 seconds long. The process repeats indefinitely. It is temporal, musical, and philosophical: a return that never arrives at precisely the same place. Each cycle alters the distribution, damage, and reconstruction of the world. The score changes too. Image and sound remember themselves imperfectly.
–0:30
The system operates without witnesses. Its robots maintain a world whose original purpose has been forgotten. They repair what breaks, but reconstruction is never exact. The structures begin to decay.
A damaged star sits at the center of ringworld shelves, relay gates and distant habitats. The main terrain is a field of 96 by 96 boxels, 9,216 instanced cubes; more than twenty further layers of boxels build the cities, ruins, craft and clouds. From the opening view, 670 boxels line up for a moment into Engine City, Spalter's 2019 painting.
–0:53
The world’s star ruptures, sending a shockwave through space.
Each structure moves only when the shock front reaches it, which leaves real gaps: tilted decks, falling undersides, debris in orbit. The camera pulls back to the widest view of the cycle so the shock can be seen arriving, radius by radius.
–1:45
Robotic forces emerge to rebuild.
Eight repair robots arrive from the outer settlements, carry material along visible routes and rebuild the city cell by cell from a new blueprint. A broken magenta landmark is replaced by a cyan successor that branches differently, and the change carries into the next cycle. Late in the repair the camera finds Gravity Well, another 2019 painting, drifting at the edge of the system as a damaged spacecraft.
–2:12
The star is eventually restored and reignites, illuminating a world that resembles its predecessor but is not an exact reproduction. Decline begins again.
The fleet departs and the changed world begins to sag. The next cycle starts from this changed world, with a new mechanical score.
The robots simply continue work: repairing the ruins, tending the star, and preparing a future for an audience that may never arrive.
The world ends. The world is repaired.
The light returns.
Elsewhere, again.
Anne to approve or rewrite this draft
With Elsewhere, Again I went back to the early AI imagery and processes I worked with in 2019 and brought them into the present. The work uses AI interpretations of my previous works to imagine a civilization that has outlived its inhabitants but not its code: a return that never arrives at precisely the same place.
The world is built from boxels, three-dimensional pixels. At its center is a damaged star, surrounded by the cities of a civilization whose inhabitants are gone. Every 2 minutes 12 seconds the star ruptures, robots rebuild what broke, and the star reignites. The rebuilding is never exact. Each repair introduces mutations, and the score changes with them.
Two of my paintings, Engine City and Gravity Well, live inside this universe as unstable memories. In 2019 I painted them in oil from small compositions made with an early neural network. Here they return a second time, interpreted by AI and rebuilt in boxels. Engine City resolves for a moment out of an arrangement of boxels and then dissolves back into infrastructure; Gravity Well drifts at the edge of the system as a damaged spacecraft.
a paragraph on how Anne and Todd Dailey made the work together with Claude: who decided what
The work found its current shape through many iterations. One of the last decisions was to take something out: we quadrupled the boxel geometry, looked at it, and removed it again.
You can take the camera whenever you like, and when you let go, the system resumes its journey. I am interested in the sadness of systems that faithfully perform their duties after the reasons for those duties have disappeared.
Anne Spalter
The work took its current shape through many iterations. These are the revisions that changed it, in order, from the first boxel landscape to one of the last decisions. Each image is that revision, rendered for this page. Anne's notes on four or five of these steps: what she asked for, and why
First build: a boxel landscape around a fractured star, with sound that starts only when the visitor enters.
Recursive ruins: an inverted, delayed copy of the landscape hangs overhead, and smaller copies of the world sit inside the broken core.
The world is rebuilt as the remains of a solar civilization: ringworld fragments, orbital foundries, relay gates.
Destruction and repair become the work's cycle.
The star can now reignite, and the cities appear at a scale people could have lived in.
Each cycle gets its own mechanical score.
The rupture becomes a flight through the whole system.
Gravity Well and Engine City enter the world.
The two paintings are made quieter, and the space around them rebalanced.
The views of the paintings widen, and clouds of boxels appear.
Repairing the star becomes the fleet's final act.
The end of one cycle now joins the start of the next without a seam.
The artist statement is added to the work.
The boxel geometry is quadrupled.
The quadrupled geometry is taken out again.
Quadrupled
Reverted
Elsewhere, Again draws on themes from across Spalter's earlier work. Two oil paintings from 2019, Engine City and Gravity Well, are built into it. Rebuilt from boxels, they reappear as unstable memories, and their forms enter the world’s visual unconscious.
Engine City is built as an anamorphic district. Each of its 670 boxels sits at a different depth along a line of sight from the opening view, so the engine assembles only from that one point, at the edge of a wide view of the system. As the camera moves on, it dissolves back into infrastructure.
Process renders made for this page from the work's own construction code, with the rest of the world hidden.
Gravity Well survives as a distant, damaged spacecraft at the edge of the system. Late in the repair, the autonomous camera pulls back far enough to find it.
The palette comes from Spalter's earlier work: saturated mineral and neon color against a deep black-blue. Magenta, cyan, violet and gold carry the world, and the star burns white-gold. The Engine City boxels keep the painting's own colors: the orange of the engine's body, ochre, oxide red and the dark of its ports. Color also carries the cycle. Each repair moves colors as well as shapes, so a magenta landmark broken in the rupture returns as a cyan successor.
The score is AI-generated, made with ElevenLabs. The track lasts exactly one cycle, 2 minutes 12 seconds, and loops sample-accurately with the image, so the seam cannot be heard. Over it, each cycle generates its own mechanical score from a fresh seed: isolated calls in the old world, broken low pairs at the rupture, an imperfect five-count ritual during the repair, an altered ascent when the star reignites. Sound begins only when the visitor enters.
The visitor may interrupt the autonomous camera and explore the space directly. After a period of inactivity, the system quietly resumes its journey.
For more than three decades, Anne Spalter has used the computer to imagine future worlds. Trained in mathematics at Brown and in painting at RISD, she taught the first digital fine arts courses at both schools in the 1990s and wrote The Computer in the Visual Arts (1999). She is also a collector of and lecturer on early computer art.
Her work is in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and the RISD Museum, and is part of a promised gift of digital art to LACMA (announced October 2026).
Her current work with AI continues to use custom image pipelines alongside painting and drawing and augmented reality, building speculative landscapes of myth, cosmos and cities that combine her inner and outer experiences. Spalter searches for a technological sublime in which archetypal images are updated and re-imagined through machine vision systems trained on our collective visual memory.
These works also contributed to Elsewhere, Again.
Miami Marbles, 2016. Installation of inflatable spheres.
NYC Dreaming, 2016–17. 52-channel video installation, Fulton Center, New York.
Meet Me in the Sun, 2018. Video sculpture installation.
Sky Ship Inflatable, 2021. Inflatable sculpture from an AI-generated design.
Touch, 2021. Digital woven tapestry, 37 × 52 in.
Thresholds, 2025. Video.
The work's details, for collectors, curators and conservators.