An Artistic and Scientific Exploration of What Makes Each Element Unique – From Noble Gases to Reactive Renegades
Elemental Archetypes is a creative exploration that blends art, technology, psychology and chemistry to reimagine the periodic table as a living gallery of characters. Each of the 118 elements is personified through a visually striking digital collage, enriched with history, science, and symbolic detail. Their unique properties, such as reactivity, density, rarity, or uses, are translated into narrative descriptions and expressive portraits, with inspiration from the Five-Factor Model of personality to help guide carefully chosen visual and literary metaphors. By combining traditional art techniques with 3D modeling, digital collage, and other new media, the project transforms chemistry from abstract data into vibrant personalities and stories. The goal is to highlight the beauty of nature’s building blocks while also offering insights into their history, uses, and properties.
Each artwork aims to spark curiosity and wonder, with striking portrayals ranging from the lightness of hydrogen to the magnificence of gold, the tireless strength of iron, and the constructive/destructive duality of uranium’s energy potential. By giving these elements a visual identity, abstract concepts are made more relatable and easier to understand.
The collages were made with a wide combination of traditional and digital art techniques and tools, depending on the specific desired result. Using photo editing software, I composed base images by combining public domain photographs, hand drawn sketches, digital paintings, renders of 3D digital sculptures I had created, and sometimes even well known portraits by Renaissance artists, as well as bits and pieces of cobbled-together AI generated compositional elements.
One unpredictable challenge was the rapid advancement of digital tools, as well as my own development of techniques for optimal use of them. What seemed good enough at the start of the project in 2022 felt outdated by 2025, leading me to revisit and retouch most of the early works.
Three years (several thousand hours) in the making, the project was first exhibited at the Technical Museum Nikola Tesla in Zagreb (May–September 2024) under the exhibition title “Elementally AI – the Periodic Table of Elements Personified“. The exhibition title was chosen to reflect the utilization of machine generated assets as some of the building blocks of the digital collages and their subsequent animation, as well as to pique audiences’ curiosity about the latest technological innovations in media. The museum hosted more than 375,000 visitors in 2024.
Mindful of ethical concerns around AI, in every case it was used I avoided prompts referencing living artists and those whose works are not in the public domain, made substantial manual alterations to all machine generated assets, and kept detailed records of my creative workflow, from initial sketches to the final artworks.
