Work in Progress
On the Easel: Are There Deserts in Vector Space
Sketch for Are There Deserts in Vector Space, 2025, Acrylic on Paper.
Sketch for Are There Deserts in Vector Space, 2025, Acrylic on Canvas.
Sketch for Are There Deserts in Vector Space, 2025, Pencil on Paper.
Sketch for Are There Deserts in Vector Space, 2025, Pencil on Paper.
Sketch for Are There Deserts in Vector Space, 2025, Pencil on Paper.
Sketch for Are There Deserts in Vector Space, 2025, Pencil on Paper.
Fall 2025
I've been sketching for a larger painting in the Data Sculptures series. This is more preliminary work than I usually do, but I'm planning to finish the piece in oil, which I rarely use. I'll likely work with a limited (Zorn) palette: Yellow Ochre, Red, White, and Black.
The plan is for a self-portrait, at night, in a desert. Lots of dark, empty space, with the figure lit from above. The layout and theme carry intentional biblical echoes, and I hope the final piece reflects that atmosphere.
The working title is "Are There Deserts in Vector Space ()". Some of the sketches, though, make me think it ought to be Desserts instead of Deserts. I'm considering a few different subtitles for the brackets: "Like the deserts miss the rain" (Everything but the Girl), "I'm not expecting to grow flowers in the desert" (Big Country), or "A horse with no name" (America).
For the deeper meaning, I'm leaning into the idea of vector space as it relates to AI and Large Language Models (LLMs). These systems learn numerical representations (embeddings) that live in a high-dimensional mathematical space; semantic similarity shows up as proximity, and relationships often appear as directions or offsets. So "male" and "female", for example, can occupy positions that mirror the relationship between "king" and "queen", the coordinates aren't the same, but the vectors between them run in parallel. Recent models complicate this by encoding not just the word but also its surrounding context, so a word's representation shifts with its sentence, creating a landscape that changes with perspective. Still, the metaphor holds: the math sketches a geography of meaning, and in that geography there are barrens, regions sparsely or never described by the training data. Deserts that reflect both the limits of our understanding and the blind spots of our biases.
My question is: are there semantic deserts in this geography regions where there are no words, no language to describe what might lie there? Our language shapes how we think and what ideas we can even consider. Different languages carve this landscape in different ways; some concepts exist in one but not another. In art, negative space the empty parts of a composition can be just as important as the filled ones. What might we learn by paying attention to the negative spaces in our language?
