French-Senegalese artist Delphine Diallo says she uses artificial intelligence (AI) “not as a tool, but as a ritual collaborator.” At an African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta (ADAMA) Arts Salon talk with Georgia Tech professor Susana Morris this past Sunday. There, Diallo explained what that means and what she brings to the process.
“Delphine Diallo: The Mythic Quest,” opened at ADAMA on Sept. 18 and runs through Nov. 18. The show debuted at the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia, in 2025.
The show is made up of six series tracing Diallo’s artistic evolutions across the gallery. It moves from digital photography self-portraiture to a series of collaborations with other female artists “with whom Diallo has developed long-term, reciprocal relationships,” as the exhibition’s materials put it and finally to AI-made visuals.
“The Mask & Yohana” (2020, from the God is a Woman series), shows Diallo in beaded braids posed beside a carved mask awash in sepia. Another piece, “Universal Law” (2018), is an image of two women nose to nose, faces decorated with white lines, bearing ornamental headpieces. Not far away, hangs “Spiritual Warrior” (2025), a collage of photographs, feathers and computer parts that Diallo calls a “map-like visual thesis” tracing 14 years of her work, while on a nearby video screen, a woman gazes out from behind a beaded headdress. The subtitle reads, “Wisdom is what gives you real capacity in the world.”
AI as an artistic collaborator
Diallo began experimenting with artificial intelligence in 2022, “not to generate random images” but to build a visual world rooted in her own work and experiences. Her desire to build that world is rooted, in part, in something else — her study of objectification in photography. “It’s even happening before you press the button,” she said. Diallo’s aim is to use AI to counter that history rather than repeat it.
She’s thoughtful and deliberate, though, about how she uses AI tools. MidJourneys generates her vision into still images. RunwayML and Kling AI animate her ideas. To that end, she developed what she calls the NA’TERA Embodiment Protocol. It is a digital template that treats Diallo’s own physicality — how she breathes, gestures and moves — as source material for her AI work, rather than letting the tools generate generic figures on their own.
At the Arts Salon, an audience member asked how Diallo keeps outside biases from slipping into her work unnoticed, bias possibly built into the tools themselves.
Experience and preparation, Diallo said.
“I already entered the space with twenty years of framework of understanding that nobody’s gonna take away my vision or my narrative from my lived experience,” Diallo replied. “So AI for me is the expansion of my consciousness inside of the tools, but I needed to create the entire body of work before I entered.”
That technical process of uploading her “consciousness” sits inside a personal discipline Diallo guards close. “I enter with …, my agency, my sovereignty,” Diallo told the ADAMA Art Salon crowd, describing the act of opening an AI program as a kind of ritual. “I’m preparing myself to enter. I’m gonna take a tea. I’m very aware. … Awareness has to be present.”
Worldcrafting with AI
In addition to digital photography, Diallo is using that process and practice to build Motherverse, an episodic sci-fi video series. Still and clips from the series are on view as part of the exhibition.
The story follows Amaya, a 33-year-old woman in New York. In 2084 who is led by a mysterious voice into the Motherverse, a hidden layer of reality guarded by 12 Oracles, each embodying a forgotten human capacity — among them memory, dreaming and resonance.
Diallo is the project’s creator, writer and director. AI tools generate the imagery, environments and visual sequences. She shapes them through editing, sound design and narrative direction, guided by what she calls the Oracle Codex, a framework developed over three years to connect imagery, symbolism, character and myth.
The project is still in development.
Representing a future informed by memory
To close the Art Salon discussion, Morris asked what Diallo hopes audiences carry into their own lives after experiencing her work, tying the question to the “return” stage of the hero’s journey structure that inspired the show. Diallo referenced a scene in Motherverse in response.
“So, in the movie, you have a moment where I have my 8-year-old self speaking to me and asking me, Where have you been?” Diallo said. “ When I created that scene, I cried … I was like, ‘I don’t know what AI did to me, but I don’t feel good right now.’ But what happened is imagine [being] able to heal yourself through the remembrance of all the pieces that you cannot reconnect into this reality.”
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Diallo said the worlds she’s building exists for that reason. “This sci-fi is made for people to remember something that they had inside of them,” she said. “To remember our humanness and a connection with a very ancient way to be on this planet.”
“Delphine Diallo: The Mythic Quest” is on view at ADAMA through Nov. 18. Learn more at adamaatl.org.
