“If elephants wrote history, they might present tapirs, elephant shrews (sengis), elephant seals (genus Mirounga), and proboscis monkeys as shy, novice species taking hesitant steps along the main road to evolving a trunk—species that, for some reason, never quite reached the destination; so close, and yet so far.”
Richard Dawkins & Yan Wong, The Ancestor’s Tale

The project “How Close” opens a space where science, imagination, and technology form a shared language for new forms of empathy. It is a cycle of portraits of humans and animals—not in a relation of dominance or observation, but of co-existence. Generated with artificial intelligence, these photographs are at once a project of the future and a contemporary myth: a vision of a world in which the human is no longer the center of life’s narrative, but one of its participants.

The Author, a photographer and physicist, uses AI not as a tool that replaces the artist’s work, but as a cognitive vehicle—a way to step beyond the anthropocentric paradigm. These works are more than mere visualizations: they are thought experiments, a form of visual speculation. How might our relationship with the more-than-human world look if we gave up the need for hierarchies and divisions?

“How Close” is also a story about genetic and emotional kinship. We already know that we share 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees; that ravens, monkeys, and octopuses possess self-awareness and memory; that a pig can sustain human life—literally and metaphorically. The boundaries between “us” and “them” begin to blur, and artificial intelligence—by accelerating research into interspecies communication (including attempts to decode the language of sperm whales)—is becoming a co-creator of a new empathy.

The Author enters into dialogue with this process. The images—uncannily realistic, yet clearly “from another world”—are a kind of portrait of a future in which human–animal symbiosis is not a metaphor but a fact. In these photographs, science meets poetry, futurology meets spirituality, photography meets fiction.
They pose a question that grows more urgent by the day: What is our place on Earth? Are we exceptional? Perhaps only in recognizing our closeness to other species—biological, emotional, planetary—will humanity find itself anew.