(By Maxwell Cohen)
While strolling through a graveyard sometime in the 5th century BCE, the sculptor Callimachus happens upon the tomb of a young Corinthian girl struck down by illness. Callimachus was not there immediately after the girl’s burial, when her nurse (lingering perhaps for a last look on the sweet child’s grave) placed a basket of beloved toys thereupon, and topped the basket with a heavy roofing tile to counteract strong winds. He was not there to see the nascent roots of an Acanthus plant start snaking upwards over the grave and through the basket’s weaving. But on his walk, he saw how the Acanthus leaves had collided with the roofing tile, how they fanned outwards “into volutes at the outer edges,” or so Vitruvius tells us in The Ten Books on Architecture (30-20 BCE)
And so goes but one version of the old myth: How Callimachus’ magnum opus, the Corinthian Column —most widely-erected of the three great columns (take that Ionia and Doric!)— came to bear an imprint of the curling Acanthus leaf upon it.
Affixed to every Corinthian Column is the memory of an ancient death, a grief-stricken gesture of love, and the eternal conflict between two worlds: that of nature, and that of the humans who are born into it, who spend their lives attempting to tame it with rock and chisel, and who, ultimately failing to do so, return to it forevermore.
In the place where one world cedes to the other, something unique, surprising, and remarkably beautiful emerges.
The Corinthian Column’s somber story is the core of Untitled,xyz’s kojii.ai model, Itera Acanthus (2024), or “Again, Acanthus,” a fitting subject for one of crypto art’s most decorated 3D architects to explore. Not only a nomenclatural inversion of “AI,” Itera Acanthus is an evolution of Callimachus’ ideal: If the Corinthian Column is man’s attempt to conquer the natural order, then Itera Acanthus is man being willingly conquered by his own creation, AI. What orders above itself will AI create before it too is reclaimed by the natural order from whence it sprung?
The cycle, ever to repeat.
Again…Acanthus.
When kojii users enter Untitled,xyz’s model, we first choose whether the output will be a single column or a “context,” meaning a larger, be-columned structure. We then confront a circular slider with three marked points: Human, Nature, and Machine, each representing one victorious moment in an eternal cycle of struggle and submission. The Corinthian Column itself is our ever-present canvas. Should we orient the model towards Human dominion, the resultant columns will bear man’s intricate carvings and architectural ingenuity.
If Nature reigns instead, then the marble is overgrown with leaves, vines, moss, speckled roots, the chaotic and celebratory organic ecosystem.
Machine hegemony, meanwhile, is unique. When Untitled,xyz trained Itera Acanthus’ dataset on images of Corinthian Columns, Acanthus plants, and the experimental 3D architecture he’s spent his career creating (full of curving columns, modular cubes, and free-standing orbs), the model misinterpreted the inputs. It saw wires where it had been fed roots. It saw tangled circuit boards and power transformers in a column’s curvature. And so the AI (a LoRA model) imparted its own wisdom unto Itera Acanthus: When we veer towards Machine domination, the machine morphs what came before it into a new, integrated language.
The circular slider is key to Itera Acanthus. Users weigh the influence of Machine, Human, and Nature in varying amounts, reflecting the cyclical ceding of nature to humanity to machine and back. Untitled,xyz provides us a palette whereupon we may paint every progressive portion of that process. Every unique generation is a new node in a new chapter of a never-ending story.
And so Itera Acanthus proves itself a concept, yes, but also a command. We sit at a god’s controls, and we shout “Itera Acanthus! Again! Again!” at our whim, and the cycle —this beautiful, nonsensical, monstrous, sorrowful cycle that first sprouted up through the soil of a little girl’s grave— begins anew, reconfigured each time.
Each new universe with its own inimitable story. Its own ancient lore. In Itera Acanthus, we quite literally play God. And we do it again…and again…and again. Such is the model’s own directive.