Recognition

Recognition is a comic book collaboration with artist Bren Perez, based in Athens, Ohio. Stay tuned for our 80 page Volume 1 in 2027! We are grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for supporting this work.

All artwork copyright Bren Perez and Stephanie Dick.

Human beings have been extinct for centuries but we left behind a fully automated planetary machine system that continues the build and maintain cities, control the weather, extract resources, and more. Drones fly everywhere, identifying objects and their value to the machine. Ships full of empty shipping crates go back and forth across the ocean.

Due to a misrecognition in which a Bonobo monkey is mistaken for a human female, a man is resurrected into this world without knowing that the machine was made by people like him long ago. We learn that in this world, people do not grow and learn through experience but are instead artificially raised to adulthood and programmed — synaptically, cellularly — with everything technologists have historically thought constituted “intelligence”.

What would this resurrected man think of the world he inherited? Would he recognize himself in the sprawling automation? What and how would he see through the lens of his programming? What meaning would he find or create in his life? The Recognition comic reflects upon the existential questions of our AI present through this imagined AI future. Inspired by classics like E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, Ray Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains, and Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, we hope to explore human-machine relationships in the context of a post-extinction future.

Bren and I meet weekly to delight in our shared love of genre and comics, and to brainstorm how best to bring readers into a future world we believe allows us to ask important questions about what it means to be human and to recognize our humanity.

Make machines you would trust to make you.

Sample Pencils

  • Blueprint drawing of various scenes including a large insect or robotic creature with wings, a forest with trees and birds, close-up of bird heads, and repeated hexagonal patterns.

  • Line drawing of a comic book page featuring scenes of a jungle with primates, waterfalls, a group of monkeys, and a large robotic or alien creature with a hexagonal pattern on its head, in multiple panels.

  • A detailed outline drawing of a natural landscape with mountains, clouds, trees, cacti, and abstract honeycomb structures.

  • A detailed line drawing of a comic book page, featuring various scenes with fantastical creatures and technological elements, including a giant insect, a monkey, a turtle, a laboratory, and humanoid characters with intricate designs.

  • Blueprint drawing of a humanoid figure with a brain as a head, and internal bones, organs, muscles, and nervous system, surrounded by hexagonal pattern and empty hexagon placeholders.

Sample Thumbnails

  • A sketch of a person with glasses looking at framed pictures on a wall in an art gallery, with a sign that says, "If you are reading this it means you are alive."

  • A sketch of a comic strip with several panels featuring handwritten text, sketches of various objects, and abstract shapes, illustrating a conceptual or artistic idea.

  • Sketch of a still life scene with a ramen bowl, chopsticks, and scattered ingredients, with rough sketches of people or figures above.

  • A rough, sketched sequence of eight panels illustrating a story. The drawings depict a person with a bun hairstyle, possibly sitting at a table, interacting with a crab that appears to move or behave aggressively.

  • A hand-drawn comic strip showing a person describing a experience with sensory overstimulation. The comic includes eyes, a messy table, and clouds or steam, with text indicating feelings of tiredness and sensory overload.

Early Concept Art

  • A black and white illustration of a surreal scene involving a robot with a display screen, mechanical arms, and tubing, connected to a window with floating text. Below, three human heads are depicted—one with a snake opening its mouth near a fetus, the second with a robotic element on the head, and the third with closed eyes and a beard. The scene includes a large tree with twisted branches and ropes.

  • Black and white illustration of a person standing on a balcony overlooking a river with boats. Large eyes and a face are embedded in the background, with bookshelves and tentacle-like structures surrounding the face.

  • A black and white drawing of a futuristic cityscape with tall, irregular skyscrapers. In the foreground, a river is filled with numerous mechanical tentacles. A robotic rabbit is floating in the water near the tentacles. The sky has large clouds, with a flying drone and a rabbit-shaped object flying among the clouds.

Pysanky

I have been writing pysanky since I was eight. The word “pysanky” comes from the Ukrainian verb pysaty (писати), which literally means “to write.” It is a craft for decorating eggs developed in pagan Salvic cultures. The process involves writing on the surface of an egg shell with beeswax using “kistka” — a stylus with a metal funnel in which you melt the wax over a candle flame. Eggs are coloured based on the fact that where there is wax on the eggshell, no dye will take. Starting with white, and proceeding from lightest to darkest dyes, you proceed to layer wax and colour. At the end, when you melt the wax off, all of the colours will be revealed! Below are some of my creations on chicken and ostrich eggs.

Traditional Ukrainian Eggs

  • Decorative Easter eggs with intricate patterns on black stands, placed on a wooden surface with a glass bowl and white container in the background.

  • Decorated white egg with blue geometric and floral patterns on a black background.

  • A white and blue decorative egg with intricate geometric and floral patterns, placed on a black surface.

  • Decorated Easter egg with green and white geometric and floral patterns

  • A hand holding a decorated Easter egg with intricate patterns and images of two white deer facing each other, with a stylized tree between them, all in vibrant colors.

  • Decorative egg with a traditional folk art design featuring white deer, a tree, and geometric patterns in red, black, orange, and turquoise.

  • Decorative Russian nesting doll with traditional patterns and reindeer designs in red, black, and white colors held in a person's hand.

  • Colorful decorated Easter egg with traditional folk art design featuring white stags, trees, and geometric patterns on a wooden surface.

  • An intricately decorated Easter egg with geometric and floral patterns in red, yellow, green, and white, resting on a dark surface.

  • Decorated Easter egg with intricate geometric and floral patterns in red, yellow, black, and white, displayed on a small silver stand against a dark background.

  • A hand holding a decorated Easter egg with intricate geometric patterns in purple, white, green, and orange.

  • A hand holding a decorated white egg with intricate black, red, and yellow geometric patterns, set against a background of white snow.

Inspired by Carl Jung’s The Red Book

Alternative and Comic Inspired

  • Inspired by Pushwagner's "Soft City"

  • Inspired by Pushwagner's "Soft City"

  • Inspired by Pushwagner's "Soft City"

  • Inspired by Pushwagner's "Soft City"

  • Inspired by Pushwagner's "Soft City"

  • Inspired by Pushwagner's "Soft City"

  • Inspired by Pushwagner's "Soft City"

  • Pushwagner's "Soft City"

  • Inspired by Pushwagner's "Soft City"

  • Inspired by Pushwagner's "Soft City"

  • A Garden Quilt

  • A Garden Quilt

  • Inspired by Maui

  • The North Portal of the Urnes Stave Chuch in Norway, where my Mom's paternal ancestors are from

  • Inspired by the North Portal of the Urnes Stave Chuch in Norway, where my Mom's paternal ancestors are from

  • Inspired by the North Portal of the Urnes Stave Chuch in Norway, where my Mom's paternal ancestors are from

  • Inspired by the Urnes Stave Chuch in Norway, where my Mom's paternal ancestors are from

  • Inspired by Bren's art for the Recognition comic

  • Inspired by Bren's art for the Recognition comic

  • Inspired by Bren's art for the Recognition comic

  • Inspired by the artwork for a very special conference a U Michigan

  • Inspired by the artwork for a very special conference a U Michigan

  • Inspired by the artwork for a very special conference a U Michigan

  • Kaluga embroidery of the Slavic goddess Mokosh. From the Belgorod Museum of Folk Culture

  • Inspired by a Kaluga embroidery of the Slavic goddess Mokosh. From the Belgorod Museum of Folk Culture

  • Inspired by a Kaluga embroidery of the Slavic goddess Mokosh. From the Belgorod Museum of Folk Culture

  • Inspired by Escher

  • Inspired by Hubble

  • Inspired by Hubble

  • Inspired by Hubble

  • For Palestine

  • For Palestine

  • For Palestine

  • Taking the wax off Tumbling Blocks

  • Tumbling Blocks

  • Tumbling Blocks

Processes