The Thousand
Names of
Macskusz

For the exhibition, we propose presenting a mini-series of 3 × 3 avatars of Macskusz, a mythical creature. In the video above, Macskusz appears in the form of an aphid, the form it took on January 2, 2026, when it called itself "Kis Kobaltcsillag". The avatars will be automatically regenerated three times per day on the 5th, 6th, and 7th of June, based on what is happening in the world on that day.

For the presentation, we require a screen displaying our website, where the current image will be shown in a repeating loop: the newly generated avatar appears, remains visible for a few minutes, and then comes to life in a short animation of about ten seconds before the cycle begins again. Loudspeakers to play the sounds accompanying the animation could be nice but are not necessary.

The creature called Macskusz emerged from the love language between Vero and Max and gradually took on a life of its own. It functions both as a mascot and as a form of documentation of their relationship, attempting to capture the experiences and moods of each day by allowing them to manifest, day after day, in a new entity.

The paper-cut series was still limited to the pages of the book. Although the project concluded with image no. 76 after that initial run, it was revived in 2025 when Max proposed recreating the process of the "Macskuszization" of the world using AI.

To do so, we first scanned the whole physical book in high resolution and used low-rank adaptation fine-tuning to create a FLUX.1-dev image-generation model that outputs the precise style of the original paper cuts. Below you can see the way in which the model's outputs came to resemble the originals during training.

We then built a pipeline. Each day we crawl the main news sites that Vero and Max read every morning. We then have an LLM simulate how we would have likely discussed the news items we would have found most interesting, based on an internal summary of our personalities.

Finally, the LLM comes up with a single targeted prompt for the image model to illustrate the essence of our day as we react to what's happening in the world. We create the image and then use it as the basis of an additional generation using Google's Veo 3.1 video model, so that the image of the day is first statically displayed and then suddenly jumps away, scuttles into the bushes, or takes flight.

Macskusz's "thousand names" were originally only a metaphor for its endless variability. With the revival of the project through artificial intelligence, we also began experimenting with having the model give literary names to each creation.

In the current computer-based workflow, the new avatars already represent a manifold of information condensed into singular, mythified symbols. In the future, we would like to channel even more data derived from our immediate physical experiences into the process, for which we plan to explore new sensor-based methods. Ultimately, we aim to create and preserve a more organically intertwined entity composed of our individual memories, bodily reactions, and the ever-changing state of the world around us.

Something that only Macskusz can do.