Logo: Amy Axelrod's line drawing of the right hand of Michelangelo's David

Personal Statement

Each new era appears, persuading us that it is unprecedented. But the turn of one’s head toward history illuminates its ordinariness. History also reveals humans’ propensity to create in our own likeness; a record beginning with handprints on cave walls1 is currently apexed by the neural architectures that subtend artificial intelligence models. My exploratory prompting surfaced the memory of encountering another of these nodes: Michelangelo’s David.2

Perceiving David was slightly out of reach for my senses. Its sublimity, caressed by the light wafting down in the Galleria dell’Accademia’s Tribuna3, clarified that, from a block of marble, Michelangelo had enshrined millennia of artists’ devotion to the body4. My comprehension again felt inadequate years later when I grasped the scientific triumph of artificial intelligence. One prompt summoned generations stacked upon each other in pursuit of the mind, their collective imprint shimmering across “Thinking.”5

A common sequence emerged as my prompts became projects. Sweeping curiosity coalesced, again and again, into simple solutions. I remembered the designer Paul Rand’s observation that simple designs are “the products of circuitous mental purposes. Simplicity is difficult to achieve, yet worth the effort.”6 When my projects required a logo, I returned to David, finding my messenger in the contour of its right hand.

In David’s right hand is the stone that returned Goliath to the earth.7 Eons of natural attrition culminated in a plain artifact, released with precision at the right time. Contemporary Goliaths, unnerving byproducts of artificial intelligence, too may succumb to similar means in resourceful hands.8

The story of civilization is cratered by moments when masses converged upon an idea. This through line connects, say, the Renaissance with today’s artificial intelligence revolution. Looking back, I am reminded of Bob Dylan, who left Minnesota for the unknown pastures of the folk music revival in New York City. Reflecting on this in his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, he recalled, “But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.”9

Notes

  1. 1Hands stenciled on the walls of the Liang Metanduno cave on Muna Island, Sulawesi, were made by blowing pigment around a hand pressed against the wall. They’re dated to at least 67,800 years ago, making them the oldest securely dated cave art yet found. Adhi Agus Oktaviana et al., “Rock Art from at Least 67,800 Years Ago in Sulawesi,” Nature 650 (2026), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09968-y.
  2. 2Michelangelo Buonarroti, David, 1501–1504, marble, Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence, https://www.galleriaaccademiafirenze.it/en/artworks/david-michelangelo/.
  3. 3David was moved from the Piazza della Signoria to the Accademia in 1873. The architect Emilio De Fabris designed the Tribuna to receive it, a room beneath a glass vault meant to light the statue as naturally as possible. “Michelangelo’s David Has Been in the Accademia Gallery in Florence for 150 Years,” Finestre sull’Arte (2023), https://finestresullarte.info/en/museums/aug-8-1873-2023-michelangelo-s-david-has-been-in-the-accademia-gallery-in-florence-for-150-years.
  4. 4On the Renaissance revival of the classical ideal of the body, see Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956).
  5. 5See Ada Lovelace, “Notes by the Translator,” Scientific Memoirs 3 (1843), Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5 (1943), A. M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59, no. 236 (1950), John McCarthy et al., “A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence” (1955), Frank Rosenblatt, “The Perceptron: A Probabilistic Model for Information Storage and Organization in the Brain,” Psychological Review 65, no. 6 (1958), David E. Rumelhart, Geoffrey E. Hinton, and Ronald J. Williams, “Learning Representations by Back-Propagating Errors,” Nature 323 (1986), Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey E. Hinton, “ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks,” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 25 (2012), Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton, “Deep Learning,” Nature 521 (2015), Ashish Vaswani et al., “Attention Is All You Need,” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30 (2017), and Tom B. Brown et al., “Language Models Are Few-Shot Learners,” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33 (2020).
  6. 6Paul Rand is synonymous with some of the twentieth century’s most enduring corporate identities, including IBM, UPS, ABC, Westinghouse, and NeXT. Paul Rand, “Logos, Flags, and Escutcheons,” AIGA Journal of Graphic Design (1991), https://www.paulrand.design/writing/articles/1991-logos-flags-and-escutcheons.html.
  7. 71 Sam. 17:40–49. For a literary translation, see Robert Alter, The David Story (1999).
  8. 8For a survey of risks associated with advanced AI, see Yoshua Bengio et al., International AI Safety Report 2026 (2026), https://internationalaisafetyreport.org.
  9. 9Bob Dylan is perhaps an unusual choice to invoke alongside David, Rand, and David. His moment of departure to New York City was not a “Simple Twist of Fate”, as it were. He was one among many troubadours, bards, and artists walking along a worn path. He had spent years obsessively studying folk music, steeping himself in any record he could get his hands on and reading everything available to him, later citing folk musicians, Don Quixote, Moby-Dick, and The Odyssey among references in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which commemorated his poetic contributions to the American song tradition. With his guitar and trove of lyrics yet unwritten, his proverbial marble and chisels or sling and stones, he became an inflection point in modern music. He reinvented songwriting, funneling the universal into the personal, sometimes in his likeness. Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (2004); Bob Dylan, “Nobel Lecture” (2017), https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2016/dylan/lecture/.

Logo drawn by Amy Axelrod, after Michelangelo’s David. © 2026 Amy Axelrod.