Boy Wonder continues my ongoing #arthack practice of intervening on exhibitions and digital spaces as Net Art with my animated figures and critical discourse, a series I began in 2016. Many of these #arthacks have been widely profiled in the press, gone viral online, won major art awards, sold as NFTs into top collections, and been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide.

In an unexpected twist, Boy Wonder turns that spirit of intervention toward AI itself. Starting from a 2D AI-generated portrait, I used AI tools to reconstruct a 3D mesh from the data, which I then reworked through sculpting, procedural, and generative 3D animation techniques. The background, used generative AI video, that I then further altered, recolored, reanimated, and voxelized within the 3D scene. I created the music going back and forth while animating, to build the right soundscape.

What began as a simple 2D AI image evolved into a Chronometric Sculpture and an animated painting. This work, though born from AI processes, is ultimately a human-made arthack of a 3D AI mesh, as an artistic intervention asserting that human creativity, agency, and intentionality remain vital, even in the age of Synthetic Art and visual automation.

Clay Renders are a longstanding tradition in 3D CG practice, used to reveal the purely sculptural qualities of digital meshes and scenes. In the age of Generative AI, when collectors and viewers often ask what is human-made and what is AI, clay renders take on renewed meaning.

For 3D CG native digital art that is primarily human-made, these renders become a form of proof, an aesthetic and conceptual statement that exposes process, authorship, and the enduring presence of the human hand within the digital.