Temple of AI
A 32-metre oil frieze, abstract to the eye — until Apple Vision Pro lets a pantheon of gods step out of the paintings into the room. At its centre, an AI avatar that answers live, in the artist's own voice.
Mixed-reality artwork for Apple Vision Pro.
Abstract to the naked eye.
At Poolhaus Blankenese in Hamburg, a 32-metre oil frieze lines a historic pool house — compositions Dennis Rudolph first painted in virtual reality, then carried into oil. To the naked eye, they read as abstract canvases. Put on Apple Vision Pro and the same surfaces resolve into a shared baroque pantheon: Atlas, Nike, Orpheus, Gaia. Gods become visible and move within and around the paintings — and everyone in the room stands inside the same world at once.
Poolhaus Blankenese — the frieze with the naked eye, before the headset.
A mixed-reality opera.
Once the headset is on, the room turns into a stage. Gods descend from the paintings, far too large for the space; they push through the canvas and step into the room — and you realise each canvas is a precise cut-out of an over-lifesize figure, sitting on the edge of the frieze with its legs in the exhibition. Atlas lets the globe roll off his shoulders into the room.
Temple of AI is an immersive mixed-reality artwork at the intersection of VR painting, generative AI, and baroque mythology. Its conceptual anchor is California City: a desert road grid built for a city that was never constructed — the failed promise of Manifest Destiny made landscape. From this archaeology of failure, the work asks what survives when utopias collapse. Its answer is myth — and the persistence of the human need to speak with what exceeds it.
It is at once installation, performance, and living AI system — a work that does not answer questions about art, but sustains the conversation art has always been about: what comes after the human.
— Dennis Rudolph
From VR brush to oil.
The paintings begin inside virtual reality — Dennis Rudolph paints in space, originally with Tiltbrush, in a gesture that lives between sculpture and painting. That VR work becomes the template for large-format oil paintings that carry the spatial brushstroke back into the physical world. Every medium a step closer: oil, glass, bronze, pixel.
The avatar takes questions from the room.
The Artist is Present.
At the centre of the temple stands an AI avatar, built from the artist's own memories, texts, positions and voice — not a generic language model. It speaks as Dennis Rudolph, with his knowledge, his aesthetics, his contradictions. Under the hood it is a two-stage retrieval system: a semantic embedding search feeding a biographical knowledge graph. A microphone passes from visitor to visitor; every spoken question gets a live answer, and every exchange is stored as a new memory. The work grows with each visitor.
Gesamtkunstwerk
A spatial staging that only the mixing of realities makes possible.
- It is sculpture: one grasps the scene by exploring it through one's own movement in space. Figures painted in mid air, as solid brush strokes.
- It is performance, through the artist's avatar, with whom one can hold a live conversation.
- It is painting, oscillating between the virtual and the real.
Up to fifteen headsets, one shared world.
NSYNK
Dennis Rudolph / NSYNK
Poolhaus Blankenese, Hamburg
Apple Vision Pro
