vanitas veritas

Freestanding interactive installation San Francisco, 2026

v[an]itas

v[an]itas
v[er]itas

hold to choose the truth

Bowed over a sink, a figure brings up something gold: treasure, or vomit. Memento mori for the age of slop.

Katherine Titterton

scroll↓

it’s a sink.

Above a stainless sink rises a self-portrait. In its bowl, real water over a screen: a GPU dreaming.

bowl 26 × 21 × 9¾ in

mirror, 24 × 20 in

1 v[an]itas

2 v[er]itas

kat-titter.github.io/veritas ↗

veritas running in a browser: its title, the basin with the water pouring from the tap to the drain, and the line of code naming the dream

Wall text

Katherine Titterton (b. 1995)

v[an]itas v[er]itas, 2026

Stainless steel sink, water, screen, camera, computer running live generative diffusion; dye-sublimation print on aluminium

Sink 39½ × 30 × 25 in (100.3 × 76.2 × 63.5 cm); print 24 × 20 in (61 × 50.8 cm)

Unique

Courtesy of the artist

vanitas and veritas: one swap of letters apart. all the difference is a choice.

Bowed over a sink, a figure brings up something gold: treasure, or vomit. Her print hangs as a mirror, so your face lands on hers. In the bowl, water is a machine dreaming live, every dream leaning toward eight pictures chosen by hand. Turn the handle, and the water stops: no water, no dream. Reach in, and it slips through your fingers. Elsewhere, AI drinks real water: training GPT-3 could evaporate 700,000 litres of fresh water to cool it. Here the water is one small computer, and a handle turns it off.

Dutch still lifes of the 1600s painted skulls, cut flowers and soap bubbles: homo bulla, man is a bubble. Here the bubble is AI, twice over. Together the swapped letters, an and er, spell anēr, Greek for man: a mortal. Asked to judge, Pontius Pilate washed his hands and asked, “what is truth?”: quid est veritas. This sink asks you to reach anyway.

Stand at the sink, and the water dreams you for as long as you stay. Nothing is kept.

Lineage

Dutch, 400 years old: still lifes that pile up symbols of how briefly anything lasts, then tell you to behave accordingly. Same grammar, new objects.

1, Antonio de Pereda
Allegory of Vanity, c.1636, KHM Vienna

2, Harmen Steenwijck
Allegory of the Vanities…, c.1640, Nat. Gallery

3, Maria van Oosterwijck
Vanitas with a Sunflower, 1668, Rijksmuseum

4, Pieter Claesz
Vanitas Still Life (detail), 1630, Mauritshuis

5, Carlo Russo
Vanitas Still Life, contemporary

6, Dutch School
Vanitas Still Life, dated 1650

What it was saying

In the 1600s the Dutch Republic had just gotten rich, fast: global trade, a new merchant class, tulip futures, more imported luxury than anyone knew what to do with, and a rigid Calvinism that held your possessions cannot save you. Vanitas is that contradiction in paint.

Picture a patron: he commissions his shells, gold and books, has them rendered gorgeously, then hangs a skull over the pile so the indulgence reads as a sermon. Have the luxury, moralise the luxury.

Swaps

Slop is our tulip mania: infinite cheap abundance, generated faster than anyone can value it. Vanitas told the 17th century its wealth was hollow while cashing the cheque; this piece says it to the feed.

bubble →an AI bubble skull →a dissolving face treasure →the gold blob mirror →glossy aluminium

no water in the sink,

so you can’t wash your hands of it.

Its screen boots straight into the water; a power cut is just the tap turned off. On the web, the same water runs as veritas, and a touch there reaches the sink’s water as a ghost touch. On the sink, a QR code opens it: sink == sync: one water.

Themes engaged

vanitas, then and nowAI bubbleendless generationtaste as ground truthbody’s reflexwashing your hands of itconsent and the cameraone machine, no cloud

FormFreestanding interactive

PrintDye-sub on aluminium, 24 × 20 in

SinkStainless, 39½ × 30 × 25 in

Screen27 in, under a tray of real water

CameraIn the print; sees whoever stands there; never kept

ComputeKat’s old MacBook Pro, lid closed under the bowl, for the piece alone

PowerOne outlet, auto-boot

EditionUnique (1 / 1)

how the water is made

01genre

Midjourney style reference, made by hand from vanitas paintings, 1630 to now

Allegory of Vanity
Antonio de Pereda, c.1636

Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life
Harmen Steenwijck, c.1640

Vanitas with a Sunflower
Maria van Oosterwijck, 1668

Vanitas Still Life (detail)
Pieter Claesz, 1630

Vanitas Still Life
Carlo Russo, contemporary

genre says it already: shiny, then gone, 400 years before any model.

02taste

Midjourney, picked by hand

Midjourney--chaos 100--stylize 1000kept 8

vanitas [flower, skull, soap bubble] --chaos 100 --ar 4:3 --sref https://s.mj.run/wu5Pv45blp4 --profile f5vl77o --stylize 1000 --hd --v 8.1

never automated: taste stays human, and every dream leans toward one of these.

03prompt

grammar: prompt (a·i + b) mod N, each once, scrambled, never stored

sink.pyprompts()stride (a·i + b) mod NWORDS_MIX 0.08–0.25

vanitas [subject, subject, subject], mood light

three of 44 things, always a skull or a soap bubble and a flower or a skull

431

sets of three subjects

× 6

orders

× 28

moods

× 18

lights, or none

> 1 M

prompts

∞

blends of two, at any weight

dream Avanitas [a wilting tulip, skull, daisy], dissolving into light in lamplightdream Bvanitas [a dried rose, flower, soap bubble], cracking open through rain

every word stays inside the genre: endless, never a borrowed voice.

04dream

Stable Diffusion 1.5 + LCM-LoRA: blend halfway, then 3 of 10 steps steered by the prompt. About 3 s a dream.

sink.pykeyframe()dream_lat()STEPS 10GUID 1.5DREAM_S 0.34–0.44pull 0.35–0.6

dream A

moodboard 01

start

prompt B

3 of 10 steps

dream B

3 of 10 steps: subjects only half-surface. Moodboard 01, dashed, pulls every dream back from the model’s own average.

05walk

three waypoints dreamed with the prompts blended; one curve through all five; each point decoded by the VAE

sink.pydetour()waypoint()WP_F .25 .5 .75WP_STR .40 .46 .40SEG 12

every frame between is read off one curve, so change stays slower than the eye notices from across the room: you have to come close.

06detail

Real-ESRGAN x4plus on the Neural Engine, beside the dreaming. 0.76 s a frame.

upscale.pyesrgan_gpu()model x4plusprecision fp16

enlarged plainly

Real-ESRGAN × 4

sharp at gallery size on one small computer, no cloud.

07water

stable fluids in WebGL2 on your own graphics card: each frame is dye, poured at the tap, swirled, drained; bubbles rise and pop

sync.htmlforcedyedisplaySIM 256PI_N 36Q0 0.005POP 3.2 s

dream B

→

+ water

→

+ glass

→

+ bubbles

you cannot hold water.

∞loop

dream A

dream B

∞

vanitas [a wilting tulip, skull, daisy], dissolving into light in lamplight

vanitas [a dried rose, flower, soap bubble], cracking open through rain

vanitas [skull, smoke from a snuffed candle, soap bubble], scattering into dust

under the hood

computer

old MacBook Pro; timed on an Apple M5

memory

2.3 GB of GPU memory in half precision, handed back after every dream

upscaling

in a process of its own

disk

only the last 60 frames

after a GPU error

restarts from the last dream; queued frames keep pouring

code

vanitas-veritas: sink.py, latent.py, upscale.py, sync.html

fine print.

Accent colour

#D2914F: gold marks what is current or chosen, the only saturated colour in a cool monochrome.

Origin: slop, sink

Made first for tiat’s open call Epistemologies of Slop (San Francisco, 2026), a show on AI “slop.” Slop is everything but the kitchen sink, so the work brings the sink. tiat’s basement already keeps “a slop station (an empty room with one metal sink)”, found after the sink was drawn (Hayes, Gazetteer SF, 2025). And on 26 October 2022 Elon Musk carried one into Twitter, “let that sink in” (Feiner, CNBC, 2022).

Citations

Reference plates: public domain via Wikimedia Commons, except Russo (© the artist). Built with Claude & Claude Code (this site; the water). Type: Bricolage Grotesque, Space Grotesk.

Words

vanitas: Latin vanus, empty; futility, transience.

veritas: Latin, truth. One swap of letters from vanitas.

homo bulla: “man is a bubble” (Varro, via Erasmus).

anēr: Greek, man; the figure the bubble stands in for.

List price, from materials up

materials: sink, screen, computer, print, frame, switch, camera, mounts$3,272

labour, 146 h × $50$7,300

artist’s share$10,572

÷ 0.60, as a gallery keeps 40%$17,620

rounded up to end in 666, a memento mori$17,666

parts, links and hours: build guide ↗

$17,666

unique, 1 / 1

artist 60%$10,600

gallery 40%$7,066

Katherine (Kat) Titterton

San Francisco based scientist and generative artist. Since 2023 she trains her own diffusion style codes: choosing is the truth.

katherinetitterton@gmail.com

Made at a sink in San Francisco, with Midjourney, Claude, and one held breath.

build guide ↗the black paper ↗

water off 0.0s