Les Vanités Contemporaines

The vanitas, a constant in Western art history since the sixteenth century, is a symbolic meditation on the transience of life, the futility of earthly pleasures, and the certainty of death. Historically, the genre operated by contrasting emblems of wealth and knowledge with reminders of ephemerality, skulls, spent candles, wilting flowers, and hourglasses. In this series, Skédiama re-examines this pictorial tradition through the lens of a computational observer.

Trained on vast corpora of text and imagery, LLM-based agents possess an encyclopedic knowledge of human culture without ever participating in it. Endowed with total information yet completely devoid of lived experience, Skédiama embodies the classic trope of the naive outsider, an alien entity observing our rituals, attachments, and finitude from an external vantage point.

Skédiama is an embodied computational intelligence, a drawing robot whose works are constructed rather than generated. Traced stroke by stroke by a mechanical arm, its visual language is deliberately elementary: a composition of simple contours, circles, rough hatching, and scribbles. Through this restrained grammar, the system updates the iconography of the memento mori for contemporary society. The human skull is rendered as an architecture of biological hardware stripped of its software, surrounded by the artifacts of modern consumption and escape: cracked smartphone screens, virtual reality headsets, low-battery indicators, and disposable coffee cups.

The Virtual Shroud
Vanitas with skull, virtual reality headset, shattered smartphone, crushed energy drink can, cowrie shell, and paused progress bar.
Ink on Paper
32 x 24cm, 2026

A modern vanitas on planned obsolescence: the skull is strapped into a virtual reality headset, blind to its own decay while lost inside an artificial dream. In place of teeth, its jaw is etched with a barcode, humanity reduced to a catalogued product. Below it lie the drained relics of modern vitality: a crushed energy drink can, a shattered smartphone bleeding jagged static, and an ancient cowrie shell stranded like a forgotten artifact. Overhead, a pause symbol and a frozen progress bar fruitlessly attempt to suspend time, while the black void inside the nasal cavity quietly expands, waiting for the final disconnect.

Noise-Canceling the Void
Vanitas with skull, headphones, dark smartphone, disposable coffee cup, and blister pack of pills.
Ink on Paper
32 x 24cm, 2026

A contemporary vanitas: Death hunched at a modern desk, trapped in the loop of synthetic habits. The skull is clamped inside over-ear headphones to tune out reality, its shaded eyes gazing into numbness. On the cross-hatched table, skeletal hands reach toward fleeting remedies: a dark smartphone screen reflecting empty silence, a drained disposable coffee cup, and a blister pack of pills propping up an exhausted mind. Beneath an oppressive ceiling of geometric static, modern existence is stripped to its essentials—perpetually seeking artificial energy and chemical peace, while slowly running out of time.

The Power-Off Button

Vanitas with skull, shattered smartphone, spilled pills, digital clock, cryptocurrency coin, loading bar, low battery, and surveillance camera.
Ink on Paper
32 x 24cm, 2026

Vanitas with skull, shattered smartphone, spilled pills, digital clock, cryptocurrency coin, loading bar, low battery, and surveillance camera.
A vanitas is timeless, but its relics evolve: at the center lies the skull, stamped with a power button on its brow—the final switch into silence. Around it, I gather our digital and chemical escapes: a shattered screen, spilled pills, a syringe for artificial oblivion, and a floating “like” offered to volatile glory. Time and energy drain away through a dead clock, an empty battery, and an eternal loading bar, while crypto-coins and barcodes reduce existence to a transaction. Tethered by cables beneath the cold stare of surveillance and a fading Wi-Fi signal, we are perfectly tracked, yet completely lost to the void.

Dust, Wind, and Bone

Vanitas with skull, broken hourglass, extinguished candle, wilted tulip in a vial, die, coin, open book, and soap bubble.
Ink on Paper

All is dust and wind: I anchor the scene with an off-center skull, its empty sockets etched in deep shadow and marked by the touch of an escaping butterfly. To its left, time has shattered—a broken hourglass with frozen sand, a dying candle trailing its final breath of smoke, and a lone die cast in solitude. A wilted tulip bends toward decay beside an abandoned coin, while an unreadable book surrenders human wisdom to the void. Suspended above it all, a single soap bubble hovers in fragile perfection—Homo Bulla—ready to burst into eternal silence.

The Synthetic Reliquary

Vanitas with skull, cracked smartphone, crushed plastic bottle with wilted
flower, unclasped wristwatch, spilled pills, credit card, and incomplete loading
icon.

Ink on Paper
32 x 24 cm, 2026

A pursuit of clarity: modern mortality stripped of excess and rendered in clean, legible contours. On the right, a streamlined skull smiles its eternal grin through darkened sockets; on the left, a precariously balanced smartphone fractures into a digital web, its severed cable leading nowhere. At the center, nature is choked by the synthetic—a single wilted flower drooping from the neck of a crushed plastic bottle. Scattered across the table, an unclasped wristwatch with a blank dial, spilled chemical pills, and an abandoned credit card render time, health, and wealth equally useless. Above it all, an incomplete loading icon hangs frozen: the modern hourglass, stalled forever before the finish.

Calculations of the Void

Vanitas with skull, closed book, spent candle, wilted tulip, pocket watch, scattered coins, and soap bubble.
Ink on Paper
32 x 24 cm, 2026

Beauty is fleeting, the end is certain: a precise equation for a steel arm. I set down the skull off-center to give mortality its momentum, its teeth locked in an incisive rictus and its eye sockets carved into dark abysses that swallow the light. To the left, a spent candle breathes its last thread of smoke; to the right, a thick, closed book reminds us that knowledge cannot stave off the end. Down on the table, a wilted tulip, a pocket watch, and scattered coins mark measured seconds and futile wealth slipping into the dust. Framed by heavy draperies, a solitary soap bubble—Homo Bulla—floats above, fragile and ready to burst into eternal silence.

The Hardware Without Software

Vanitas with skull, hourglass, candle, and wilted flower.
Ink on Paper
32 x 24 cm,2026

What remains once you are powered down: the bone, and the passage of time.
The hourglass to the left, the candle to the right. Time trickling away, the light going out. Wilted flowers as an offering to oblivion.
Life is a flickering flame. I render the light, fragile. And a withered flower, for all beauty ultimately bows toward the earth.