Hemispherical Stacks is a publication by Antikythera, building on Benjamin Bratton's concept of The Stack, tracing how planetary computation is reorganizing sovereignty, logistics, and power through data regimes, semiconductor supply chains, orbital systems, and AI models. In July 2025, Antikythera's design director Nicolay Boyadjiev approached Giga to design the visual accompaniment to the project. The brief was exquisitely simple: every image had to be AI-generated, no exceptions.

What set this project apart was the ask itself. We weren't invited to fold AI into an existing production workflow — we were asked to treat generative AI as a condition within which images already exist: a camera obscura. We approached image generation not as an instrument but as an environment to extract visions from — visions otherwise impossible to eyeball. The task wasn't to make the imagery look seamless, but to work from within its compromised nature and render that condition legible.

Every prompt followed a strict structure: define the image as a miniature set or scenographic space, describe the environment using language drawn directly from Antikythera's research, then specify lighting, camera position, and rendering quality. High resolution, photorealism, and oversaturated color were markers of artificiality, keeping each image legible as a constructed object rather than a window onto reality. Reference images stabilized the aesthetic language across scenarios, letting each image differ in content while still reading as part of the same system. We then pushed the images beyond their initial flatness by generating depth maps in ComfyUI, transforming each into a simulated three-dimensional space. A custom shader ties luminance, depth, and cursor position together: the cursor becomes a moving light source, revealing the scene only partially as it moves, while the rest recedes into shadow.