Matt Wood is an illustrator and the co-founder of the cooperative animation team Bad Idea Motion Studios.   

Wood’s Zócalo Sketchbook imagines “what nature might look like if it insisted on innovating itself to extinction.” The series was inspired by OpenAI’s release of Sora, a way to generate photorealistic video sequences based on text prompts, earlier this year. 

“As a creative, it chilled me to my core,” Wood says. “When I saw where we are headed, I thought, Why are we so addicted to relentless innovation? Why are we absolutely determined to ‘improve’ our way to extinction? It got me thinking, Would anything else in nature act the way we humans do?”

Wood’s Sketchbook considers the impact of the increasing incursion of generative AI on society. Rich in narrative details, each of his illustrations acts like a doorway into classic science fiction stories that ask us to reflect on our own actions in the world.