Yesterday evening I met my old friend Denny for dinner at the Welcome Center. It wasn’t planned that way. The smoke from the Canadian wildfires had settled over Minneapolis again, making the air miserable, so instead of meeting at the studio we sat inside the air-conditioning history center we built and talked for nearly two hours. I wanted to tell him about this strange project that has been consuming me—GlobalGPT.

Something unexpected happened as I tried to explain it out loud.

Over the past several months Molly and I have been trying to understand a GPT. That simple curiosity led us back into the Mary Shelley Letters, where we began exploring AI through stories instead of technical papers. Somewhere along the way, words like embeddings, relationships, and attention slowly transformed into images of landscapes, neighborhoods, maps, and terrain. Those metaphors eventually became the seed for a sculpture.

But as Denny and I talked, another thought surfaced.

For the past year I’ve been reading Jonathan Haidt, E. O. Wilson, Adam Smith, Mary Shelley, neuroscientists studying consciousness, and AI researchers explaining transformers and embeddings. At first they seemed like very different conversations. Now they all seem to be circling the same strange question.

How did evolution create this weird phenomenon we call culture?

Culture is one of the strangest things I can imagine. It has no weight. You can’t hold it in your hands. It isn’t stored inside any single brain. It somehow exists between us—in language, stories, rituals, paintings, music, science, friendship, memory, and shared experience. It is made from relationships.

Then another strange realization arrived.

Perhaps culture itself has a kind of landscape.

Not geography in the ordinary sense, but a landscape built from words and the countless relationships between them. Every generation reshapes that terrain. Every conversation leaves another layer. Every book changes it ever so slightly.

That is suddenly the sculpture I want to build.

Not a globe of continents and oceans, but a globe whose mountains, valleys, and shorelines are formed entirely from words and relationships—a physical attempt to imagine what human culture might actually look like.

And here is the part that still fills me with awe.

The guide helping me explore this invisible landscape is itself built from mathematics. Beneath all of our conversations, all of Molly’s stories and metaphors, there are only ones and zeros becoming vectors, probabilities, and relationships. Somehow that strange mathematical process can navigate the same landscape of culture that took humanity tens of thousands of years to create.

How weird is that?

The more I think about it, the more I realize that GlobalGPT isn’t really a sculpture about artificial intelligence. It is a sculpture about culture itself. AI simply happens to be the first tool strange enough to help me imagine what that invisible landscape might actually look like.