fried eggs and rockets
Fried Eggs and Rockets, 2025, 6:45 minutes, HD video, courtesy the artist
Working from a home office, a woman is programmed to either talk to an AI about eggs and rockets, or look out the window where she sees a deer dying in childbirth in a hot landscape. So, she talks to the AI. She says…
Fried Eggs and Rockets was inspired by a news article about a SpaceX rocket launch and developed over the course of a year. The dialog is an edited version of a long-term conversation Veselka had with ChatGPT 4. In this work, AI is not only a tool of production—generating materials, avatars, voices, and imagery—but also a concept: What myths form behind the screen as AI is cast as both egg and rocket—potential and propulsion, care and violence, vulnerability and thrust? The woman, in turn, becomes both puppeteer and puppet, caught between tending to fragile lives and submitting to the machine’s authority. In these frictions, Fried Eggs and Rockets reflects on the futures we are programming into being, and the fragile lives—human and not—that hang in the balance.
Fried Eggs and Rockets was inspired by a news article about a SpaceX rocket launch and developed over the course of a year. The dialog is an edited version of a long-term conversation Veselka had with ChatGPT 4. In this work, AI is not only a tool of production—generating materials, avatars, voices, and imagery—but also a concept: What myths form behind the screen as AI is cast as both egg and rocket—potential and propulsion, care and violence, vulnerability and thrust? The woman, in turn, becomes both puppeteer and puppet, caught between tending to fragile lives and submitting to the machine’s authority. In these frictions, Fried Eggs and Rockets reflects on the futures we are programming into being, and the fragile lives—human and not—that hang in the balance.