Case study
Speculative anthropology — AI-generated short film exploring material transformation of sacred artifacts in a post-collapse world
Outcome: Finished short film, released on YouTube · FLORA Museum Challenge entry
TOTEM VIDEO
Take a real Met Museum artifact and reimagine it into a new world, using FLORA — for the FLORA Museum Challenge
The idea was to carry each object into a new world — slightly altering its form, while preserving and even amplifying its original essence
In a world after collapse, a new civilization is born from the remnants of the old. But this is not a story of abandonment or forgetting. It is a story of transformation: how memory survives by changing form. The film shows objects transforming into metal. The form remains the same — monumental, permanent, enduring. In this transformation lies the film's deepest meaning.
Five additional Met Museum pieces enrich the post-collapse world's visual language: totem pole models from Tlingit and Haida traditions, a Charles Edenshaw argillite carving, a Sawos ceremonial board (Malu) from Papua New Guinea, and a shield from the Solomon Islands — each reforged in metal, each preserving the silhouette of its original form.
Presentation
The heart of TOTEM is a 19th-century rattle by the Xaadas (Haida) people, from Masset, Haida Gwaii. The Met describes it directly: "This raven rattle depicts a perched bird with wings outstretched toward its front — an unusual representation of the raven on a rattle, more typical of the way it would be depicted on a memorial (or totem) pole." This wasn't simply a musical object. A rattle like this was carried by a chief during ceremonial dances as a mark of rank, spiritual power, ritual performance, and the transmission of knowledge. The rattle was an instrument of authority — a voice that commanded attention and carried meaning between generations.
For the Haida, Raven isn't just a myth character — it's one of the two clan divisions their entire society was built on: Raven and Eagle, inherited through the mother's line. To be Raven is to carry a specific role, a specific responsibility in the social order. But Raven's significance reaches far beyond one people. Across the Pacific Northwest, Raven keeps reappearing in the same role: a creator and trickster figure, the one who changes the established order and brings a new world into being. Even in Norse mythology, Odin's ravens Huginn and Muninn represent Thought and Memory — the keepers of knowledge that fly across the world and return. Almost everywhere it shows up, Raven carries the same charge: intelligence, transformation, the thing that adapts and endures.
In TOTEM, these meanings converge. The raven becomes the central keeper of memory in a world that has lost its history. The rattle — an instrument of ceremony and rank — becomes a medallion with a single burning eye: the emblem of a civilization built not by forgetting the past, but by carrying it forward in a harder form. The raven survives not by remaining unchanged, but by changing form. Wood becomes metal. A ceremonial object becomes an idol. A symbol of one tradition becomes the foundation of a new civilization. These people have not abandoned their ancestors' knowledge. They have transformed it into something that will endure.
Presentation
A ceremonial board (Malu) made by the Sawos people of the Middle Sepik River, New Guinea, 19th century — carved in openwork, its pattern cut through like a lattice. In TOTEM, it becomes the emblem of male authority in the post-collapse world — a direct echo of its original role. Its motifs, reimagined and transformed, repeat not only in the radiating backrest of the throne itself, but in the standing elements beside it — reinforcing that authority. Watch the full transformation in the video above. The original board was carved by the Sawos and traded to their neighbors, the Iatmul, who used boards like this in the initiation ceremonies that mark a boy's passage into manhood — the same charge of male power that TOTEM reforges into a throne for the world after collapse.
Presentation
Traditionally, welcome poles stood at the edge of a Northwest Coast village to greet visitors, and every totem pole carried a clan's lineage and history in its carved figures — a record of memory, not an idol. In TOTEM, three separate pole models — Tlingit (1820–40, wood), Haida (1875–85, wood, pigment), and one carved in argillite around 1890 by Charles Edenshaw — are reimagined not as three separate standing poles, but fused into a single arch at the shrine's threshold, keeping that same essence: they carry clan memory and greet whoever arrives. One gate instead of three poles, reforged in metal instead of wood and stone. Model poles like these first appeared in the Pacific Northwest in the 1860s, once full-sized totem poles were no longer being carved at the same scale — smaller versions became the way carvers, including Edenshaw, kept the same imagery and tradition alive for the next generation. In the post-collapse world of TOTEM, that same tradition is deliberately amplified: several poles are merged into a single arch, scaled up to a monumental size, and carved in a far more durable material — metal instead of wood and stone — so that it reminds everyone who passes through of the history of the lineage it carries.
Presentation
Grere'o (Shield) — Solomon Islands, early to mid-19th century — fiber, parinarium-nut paste, chambered-nautilus shell, pigment. Despite its shield form, this piece was almost certainly ceremonial rather than made for combat — carried by warriors or high-status individuals as a statement of wealth, status, and identity. Its woven rattan base, overmodeled with black paste and inlaid with shimmering shell, centers on an elongated human figure surrounded by labyrinthine patterns whose exact meaning remains unknown even to Met curators today. In TOTEM, the shield keeps its form but not its material. The same silhouette — the same figure, the same labyrinth — is reforged in metal: a marker of status and identity that has outlived the world that made it, carried into the new one as pure, enduring form.
TOTEM shows that memory is not fragile — it is resilient. It survives not by being preserved untouched, but by being transformed. The objects that once held ceremonial meaning for one people become the symbols of power for another. The wisdom encoded in their forms — their balance, their proportions, their spiritual weight — is not lost. It is reborn in a new material, carrying the same essential truth. A civilization that remembers is stronger than one that starts from nothing. Silhouette preserved. Material is not.
Every artifact in TOTEM started with research, not imagination. Each of the six objects was studied through the Met Museum's own documented records — culture, date, materials, function — before any visual reimagining began. Only then did the work move into FLORA: transforming each object's material into metal while keeping its exact form, proportions, and silhouette untouched. The rule stayed constant throughout — reimagine the material, never invent the culture. The three pieces (the main film, The Gate, and The Throne) were built as one connected world, so each artifact's transformation reinforces the same idea from a different angle.
Process
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