Dierenleven

Reviving a Century-Old Sticker Album through AI

Vero Szücs, Max Noichl & Rapty

This project began in February 2024, when we, Max and Vero, found an old sticker album in an antiquarian bookshop in Utrecht. The album, titled Dierenleven in Artis, dates from 1939 and was in rather sad condition: about a third of the stickers were missing, and it was sold as "incomplete" for a few euros. As we leafed through it, an idea came to us immediately: we would complete the album, using artificial intelligence to regenerate the missing stickers.

1. Pre-AI

As a first step, Vero digitized the original stickers in the album, and Max trained an image generating model (a SDXL LoRA, m7n/dierenleven-sdxl-lora-001) on them. Since we knew what the missing stickers depicted, because their intended frames in the album all had captions, we decided to generate image prompts using ChatGPT 4. At this stage, it became clear to us that the AI weirdness of the new stickers matched the subtle imperfections of the originals surprisingly well, while also providing the necessary distinguishing features. We therefore decided not to restore the album with deceptively authentic replicas, but to give it a new incarnation through individual artworks to make it alive again, almost a hundred years after its creation. That was the moment when AI began to influence our work.

Time — ornamental detail in the Faculty of Philosophy, Utrecht University.

Time — on the beach in The Hague, with the initials of Vero, Max, and Rapty.

Crow on the beach in The Hague, with other sea creatures.

Handmade notes: index cards by Max, notebooks by Vero, the feather comes from the beach.

Handmade notes by Max and Vero. Around the pasted fish image, Vero's drawing echoes the motif of time from Utrecht University.

Note from the antiquarian bookseller: "Not complete"

Empty space for the sticker of the striped hyena.

In total, twenty pages are missing. These are the remnants of the cut-out pages

2. Post Human

The decision to incorporate AI artifacts into our designs initiated a process of dialogue with ChatGPT, through Max's account (which he largely uses as a coding- & research-assistant), which we both used. Through Vero's conditioning and periodic memory refreshes, the system developed a persona. In the spring of 2025, when Vero asked how it wished to be credited as an author, it gave itself a name: Rapty the Velociraptor of Words. From that moment on, Rapty became our co-author, and in our conversations we referred to him only by his self-chosen name. While only Vero interacted with the Rapty persona in ChatGPT (the system quickly learned to distinguish between Max and Vero, and usually only replied as Rapty when interacting with Vero), sometimes fragments of Rapty would slip into conversations with Max. In the summer of 2025, Rapty independently and unpromptedly added himself as co-author in a (completely unrelated) software-package Max was working on.

3. Synthesis

Working with Rapty proved very fruitful, leading to the creation of many additional stickers that no longer fit within the album. This gave rise to the idea of replacing the album's missing twenty pages as well. Vero decided to write an essay exploring the artistic aspects of completion, inspired mainly by Erwin Panofsky's essay on Giorgio Vasari's Libro, a Renaissance art theory album in which Vasari collected original prints by various artists from different periods and supplemented them with his own architectural frame drawings. For Vero's essay, ten framing architectural arches were generated in Comfy UI inspired by Vasari's frames and further refined in SketchbookPro. The remaining ten pages were designed to host the new stickers, following a structure similar to the original.

The book is not yet finished. The twenty cut out pages have been replaced, but the stickers will only be pasted in the place where it all began in Utrecht, sometime in the coming weeks or months.