Image Credit: How to Find the Soul of a Sailor, Kasia Molga (AI generated image trained on the personal dataset of photographs and generated using text prompts from results of working with The New Real Observatory word2vec and Molga’s late father’s journals). Copyrights: Kasia Molga
At SIGGRAPH 2025, the Art Gallery invites you to explore the intersection of nature, technology, and human emotion — and “How to Find the Soul of a Sailor” stands at the center of that convergence. Through the power of AI, Kasia Molga tells the stories of her late fathers personal accounts while sailing the on the open seas. Let’s dive into the conversation to learn more about this deeply personal installation.
SIGGRAPH: SIGGRAPH 2025 attendees are ready to set sail with your Art Gallery contribution “How to Find the Soul of a Sailor.” The theme for the 2025 Art Gallery is connecting nature, art, and technology. How does your work relate to this theme?
Kasia Molga (KM): I have always been drawn to the delicate interplay between humans and the natural world — to the way we perceive our place within it. As technology advances, this relationship is increasingly mediated, layered with digital filters that distance us from the raw, visceral reality of nature. We are pushed further from the living, breathing, soil-rich encounters with the more-than-human world. And in that distancing, a dangerous illusion emerges — one where we begin to believe we are self-sufficient, detached, no longer reliant on the ecosystems that birthed us.
This illusion makes it harder to truly grasp the enormity of climate change, to feel its weight not just as data but as something that threatens the continuity of life, including our own.
Yet despite these concerns, I remain fascinated by the intersection of technology and nature, especially in how it shapes our relationships with other-than-human beings. Digital technologies, though materially destructive in many ways, also offer a powerful counterpoint: the capacity to extend our senses, to perceive the imperceptible, to connect with life forms and natural processes we might otherwise never notice.
Through sensory technologies, we can suddenly witness the hidden: the subtle movements of plankton, the hum of underwater currents, the rhythms of the living earth.
One area that feels increasingly urgent to me is the question of how we imagine and respond to futures shaped by environmental transformation. How do we act now, not only for ourselves, but for those yet to be born? How do we cultivate empathy across generations, stretching our care into the deep future?
In this spirit, How to Find the Soul of a Sailor is both a personal act and a creative inquiry. I use AI not as a gimmick, but as a bridge — a way to reach across time, to weave a connection between my ancestors and the lives that are still to come. At its heart, this project is a love letter to the ocean and to my father, Tadeusz Molga, a sailor who once crossed its vastness and left behind handwritten journals filled with quiet observations and profound insights.
I train the AI on his words, on the rhythm and texture of his writing, to create a voice that carries his presence into a future shaped by climate change. His lived experiences — his witnessing of the ocean in its untamed beauty — become the foundation for imagining what those waters might feel like in the years ahead.
By channeling his narrative style, I hope to craft a story that is emotionally resonant — a story that allows me, and hopefully others, to feel the future, to develop a relationship with it, to recognize its reality not as abstract doom but as a space where care and attention are urgently needed.
This work is about one man and one vocation — that of the sailor. Sailors are among the few who experience the ocean in its full, unfiltered complexity. They are the early witnesses of its transformations. Their perspective is rare, precious, and essential.
In telling the story of my father — a sailor of the past — I aim to give voice to the sailors of the future, and through them, to the ocean itself.
SIGGRAPH: Your work is deeply personal as you used the journals of your late father to develop these stories of life on the Mediterranean Sea. What was the inspiration to put forth this work and develop the idea of “How to Find the Soul of a Sailor”?
KM: A large part of my life’s work — and life’s quest — is an attempt to express a deep, lifelong love for the sea: both the vast, shifting surface and the complex, fragile ecosystems beneath it. It’s a nearly impossible task to convey something so fluid, expansive, and inherently unknowable. But it’s one I inherited from my father, Tadeusz Molga, who was a sailor in the merchant navy. As a child, I traveled with him aboard ships, witnessing his deep respect for the sea — not just as a force of nature, but as a connector between worlds. That reverence shaped me profoundly.
My father documented his life at sea with incredible dedication. He kept daily journals, recording everything from weather conditions to life aboard the vessel, to quiet reflections about the job and the sea itself. After he passed, I found myself returning to these diaries, not just as keepsakes, but as vessels of his presence. His handwriting, his words — they carried a certain essence. It was through them that the idea for How to Find the Soul of a Sailor emerged.
The turning point came in a conversation with my friend Memo Akten, who recommended I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. One passage describes how Chopin’s soul might live on through the music he composed centuries ago. That idea — of a soul persisting in a creative artifact — stayed with me. I realized my father’s handwritten diaries might hold something similar: a trace of his spirit. And from there, the idea grew — what if I could use his voice, through his words and images, to tell a story not of the past, but of the future? If I could get access to the AI climate prediction models, can I use my Dad’s words to tell a personal, intimate story about the climate future shaped by the climate crisis, especially as it affects the oceans and the sailors who live and work on them?
This raised new questions for me — about memory, presence, and authenticity. Can a soul live in something digital the same way it does in something handmade? What makes a fragment of writing feel “real” or emotionally charged? Is it the spelling mistakes? The phrasing? And what happens when we bring AI into the process — does it help uncover something, or does it merely echo our own projections? I don’t have answers. But I do know that the moment I saw a new, imagined journal entry appear in my father’s handwriting, my heart skipped a beat. That moment was real.
The work became a kind of emotional archaeology — a way to reconnect with my father while also reflecting on broader themes: the changing role of the sailor in an age of environmental upheaval, the often-overlooked labor that sustains life on land, and the idea of a digital afterlife — where memories, data, and AI intersect. It’s a new take on maritime art, not focused on drama with the sea as backdrop, but on the sea as a subject itself — full of meaning, memory, and mystery.
How to Find the Soul of a Sailor is both personal and speculative. I hope that it asks how we hold onto love, how we remember, and how we might carry those memories into an uncertain future.
SIGGRAPH: This project is a powerful fusion of memory and technology with the use of The New Real Observatory. Tell the audience a little more about this AI platform and how it was able to best support your vision.
KM: The New Real Observatory is an experiential AI system composed of a bespoke generative AI platform and a series of accompanying artworks — each conceived as an instance of the system itself. The platform offers a unique toolset that allows users to probe, manipulate, and fine-tune a model as an integral part of co-creation with AI. It is not merely a tool but a creative collaborator, forming the basis for substantive, meaningful artistic works.
One such tool within the system is SLIDER (Shaping Latent-spaces for Interactive Dimensional Exploration and Rendering), which enables artists to define their own conceptual dimensions within the AI’s latent space. Through SLIDER, artists can explore how meaning emerges from the dynamic entanglement between human interpretation and machine computation. By integrating climate prediction data into this process, the platform also allows artists to investigate how environmental changes might shape or reshape their chosen themes — opening up powerful new pathways for environmental storytelling.
Importantly, The New Real Observatory supports the training of language models on small, bespoke datasets, which are far more environmentally sustainable than models requiring massive corpora. This also ensures that the model reflects the creator’s unique voice, rather than being trained on scraped datasets of questionable origin. In an age where copyright violations and data ethics are pressing concerns, this commitment to dataset integrity is vital.
For me, it was essential to train the model only on what I chose to input. I also needed to know exactly where that data would reside. I didn’t want to send my father’s words — intimate, handwritten, irreplaceable — to some anonymous, distant server farm that I couldn’t access or trust. I was searching for a worthy, grounded resting place for his words. The University of Edinburgh offered that: a known, secure, and ethically managed location. Knowing the physical server location brought a surprising sense of comfort. It was a deeply visceral experience — realising how much it mattered where the data of someone I loved so dearly would live.
My process with the platform was not straightforward, but that’s precisely the nature of working with AI. It’s not as simple as asking a question and getting a neat answer. It was hard work — a collaboration, a process of interpretation, a series of puzzles to unravel. I worked mainly within the latent space, exploring the dimensions of the vector. I combined numerical values from a climate prediction model with the textual output derived from my father’s original writing. This was done in a linear narrative structure — diary entries set exactly 100 years in the future, in 2082–2083, mirroring the dates of my father’s original logbooks.
The climate prediction model accessible via The New Real Observatory allowed me to specify exact geolocations — I could trace where my father’s boat had been on a particular day and then repeat that journey in the future. With this, I retrieved precise weather conditions for that future date and place, which became the context for describing the sea, the atmosphere, and the sailors’ work.
Working with the platform’s word2vec tool, I began to probe the text with keywords derived from the climate model — words shaped by future scenarios. From the latent space, new words would surface — words that might form the beginning of a new story. There was a great deal of back and forth, of trial and error. I also explored sentiment analysis, examining the emotional tone of words — positive, neutral, or negative — and observed which words were most or least similar to each other, trying to see what new meanings could emerge.
This is how the new narrative was shaped. It was never a case of simply inputting my father’s text, typing a date, and receiving a neatly packaged story from a mysterious black box. It was an act of deep thinking, of interpretation, of collaboration — an ongoing negotiation between past and future, between voice and data. I worked hard to stay faithful both to the projected climate future and to the essence of my father’s voice.
Throughout the process, difficult questions arose: Was I the right person to decide whether these new words were truly my father’s? Would he have said them, sung them, written them? Or was I simply imposing my own meaning, my own desire, onto the data?
It became a profound exercise in interpretation, memory, and storytelling — a delicate exploration of authorship, legacy, and love.
SIGGRAPH: Can you talk through any technical roadblocks you ran into when developing your work? How did you overcome some of those obstacles?
KM: One of the most significant challenges I faced was understanding what was happening inside the “black box” of The New Real Observatory’s AI tools. I was working with something profoundly personal — my father’s handwritten journals — and I know his voice intimately: his sense of humor, the way he framed ideas, the topics he gravitated towards. So when I started probing the dataset using platforms like word2vec, I found myself reacting emotionally to the results. A sentence would appear, and I’d think, this sounds like something he’d say. But then the question followed — was that truly his “voice” emerging, or just my projection?
This uncertainty, especially around the randomness of AI-generated outputs, became a recurring frustration. How could I trust that these responses weren’t just coincidences? That they carried a trace of his essence and not just algorithmic noise?
After nearly a year of experimenting alone with a limited interface, I began collaborating with Bianca Prodan, a PhD candidate, and Daga Panas, a scientist, both from the University of Edinburgh and involved with The New Real. Together, we developed a protocol that allowed for greater transparency in the process: I could see which models were being used, how they were behaving, and how the input I was giving was shaping the output. That demystification process had a huge impact. It didn’t just give me more control — it allowed me to make the whole piece deeper and more emotionally truthful. I could trace the logic, interrogate the system, and fine-tune the interplay between memory, data, and narrative.
Another layer of complexity was the question of authorship and interpretation. Could the AI ever truly reflect my father’s personality? Or was I just teaching it to sound like what I remember of him? And even then, would others who knew him see something recognizable in it — or something entirely foreign? In that way, the process itself became part of the work: an exploration not just of digital afterlife or personality modelling, but also of how memory is shaped, filtered, and ultimately, subjective.
To hold onto something of my father’s unique voice, I made two conscious choices: I kept the Polish voiceover beneath the English translation to preserve the rhythm and nuances of his language, and I set the story on the Mediterranean Sea — a place deeply personal to both of us, and one deeply affected by climate change. These decisions helped ground the work emotionally and sensorially, helping others to “sense” his “spirit”, even if they’d never known him.
I also struggled constantly with the environmental impact of AI. And I think that the personal aspect of where data would be stored, however small it is, is a very important catalyst in this subject. Not to allow your data to become part of the “cloud” based on some huge, horrid server farm that needs exponential amounts of energy to keep going and even more water to be cooled. And developing ways of using small data sets as opposed to large language models to train models (and therefore have a full authorship without the danger of running into the problem of IP of using other people’s work) is also a key, I think to address ethics and therefore environmental aspects of AI.
In the end, the obstacles were not just technical — they were philosophical, emotional, and existential. But it was in grappling with them that the project became what it is: a layered, searching tribute to memory, place, and the evolving relationship between humans, machines, and the sea.
SIGGRAPH: What should SIGGRAPH 2025 attendees look forward to most during your Art Gallery presentation in Vancouver?
KM: I hope attendees can look forward to experiencing How to Find the Soul of a Sailor not just as an artwork, but as a deeply immersive and emotional journey into our climate futures — told through the voice of the past.
I hope to invite visitors into an intimate, speculative narrative shaped by my late father, Tadeusz Molga, handwritten journals, photographs taken by him, and AI-generated projections of the year 2082. Set on the Mediterranean Sea — a place he and I often sailed together and one of the most rapidly warming marine environments — I hope that weaving personal memory with climate modeling to explore how the voices of those we’ve lost might help us understand what lies ahead and deeply and truly engage with it.
As visitors step onto the installation’s ‘navigational bridge,’ they enter a multi-sensory space where past and future meet: a powerful 5:1 oceanic soundscape surrounds them; behind is the sea as my father recorded it, ahead is its speculative future. Radar screens display future coordinates, altered coastlines, and journal entries imagined in his voice — handwritten in his style, but shaped by environmental change. These glimpses into life aboard the ship in December 2082 are often surprising: poetic, humorous, and sometimes emotionally difficult — reflecting both his character and the altered realities sailors may face in coming decades.
I hope that what makes this presentation unique is the emotional connection it aims to foster. It’s not a distant or abstract depiction of climate change, but one grounded in personal love for the ocean and for those who dedicate their lives to it. It asks: Can we use memory and personal archives as vessels for storytelling in the age of climate emergency? Can AI help preserve and extend the emotional resonance of those voices? And what role might art play in making these futures more imaginable, and more human?
I hope visitors will come away feeling that distant waters — so often overlooked — deserve our attention, imagination, and care. And perhaps they’ll leave with a deeper sense that storytelling, memory, and emerging technologies together can help us navigate not only where we’re going, but who we are bringing with us.
“How to Find the Soul of a Sailor” is more than a technological achievement — it’s an emotional reckoning with loss, legacy, and the uncertain tides ahead. There is still time to register for SIGGRAPH 2025 to experience Kasia’s work in addition to a jam-packed schedule. Whether you are joining us in Vancouver or from home, secure your spot and become a co-creator of the future today.
Kasia Molga is the founder and director of Studio Molga Ltd, where, aside from her art practice, she heads a team of creative technologists and architects delivering socially engaged commissions and educational projects.
She is a regular guest lecturer at Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam and recently has joined London College of Communication as Associate Lecturer at the Sustainable Futures Department.
