Asking a Machine What Dancing Feels Like: Dalos Dov's Post-Photographic Images

Dalos Dov typed questions into a language model. "What do you think running feels like?" "What do you think dancing feels like?" Then harder ones, about growing up and aging. He took each answer, a machine imagining a body it doesn't have, and fed it word for word into a text-to-image model.

What came back were "exaggerated images," he says. "Some a little bit grotesque, some a little bit dark, some a little bit interesting." The machine had a working theory of dancing. It was missing the dancing.

"Even if the machine interpreted what some things humans can only do, I don't think it fully grasps the wholeness of these actions."

That series, Do Machines Dream of Human Bodies?, is the clearest way into what he's after. Ask him what his art is about and he puts it this way.

Some parts of being a person take the time they take, however fast everything else gets. He wants to find those parts and give them the space they require.

He grew up between two worlds. His father is a chemical engineer turned finance guy who spent his career in banks and mortgages. His mother is an artist, and has been for as long as she's been his mother.

She's hard to pin to one medium. Painting, sculpture, photography, collage, lately jewelry. For about twenty years she's taken classes three times a week. The one constant is her favorite color, blue. He sees it in his own work now.

"My parents’ house looked like a storage of paintings and photographs," he says.

When the family moved to Guadalajara, his father stayed in Mexico City for work and came home on weekends. So if his mother had an opening on a weeknight, ten-year-old Dalos was her plus one.

He says it's hard to put into words what she gave him, and then he does. "That to create things is a valid way of being a part of the world." The rest of his upbringing pushed grades, numbers, and science. Watching her made room for everything else.

He wanted to study music production. In high school he took a weeklong intensive where the class dubbed part of Star Wars into Spanish. He was sure that was his future. The next semester the class wasn't offered, so he took industrial engineering instead, from a teacher so good at selling the major that he "brainwashed me and some of my friends."

"I just followed my brain more than my heart," he says.

He worked as a supply chain consultant for two years, then quit to open a restaurant with his best friend and ran it for almost four. Both jobs meant solving problems out in the world: the kitchen, sales, numbers. Slowly he noticed what he'd skipped.

"I'd never paid attention to what was happening inside of me."

He came to on-chain art sideways, through NBA Top Shot and then a Jack Butcher tweet about Bored Apes, and started as a collector. The turning point was a Bright Moments event in Mexico City. "It blew my mind," he says. He's been an artist full-time since early 2024, and it took a while before the word felt like his.

"The only thing that I had created before was Excel sheets."

So he built a habit before he tried for anything bigger. In December 2023 he started For Friends.

Each piece has three steps. He takes a medium close-up portrait of a friend looking straight into the camera. Generative AI widens the frame on both sides into a long horizontal. Then code he wrote picks a random hue from the 360 on the color wheel, so every portrait gets its own. He mints it and gives it to the friend. It will never be for sale. He makes twenty-six a year, is in year three, and plans to keep going for thirteen, watching his friendships, the AI, and his own feelings change.

"Our relationship with time is a huge part of what I'm most interested in," he says.

Giving the work away took the pressure off. Eventually he had to be brave enough to sell something. That was Do Machines Dream of Human Bodies?, a hundred pieces released in August 2025 as an Artist Rooms drop with @chilltulpa . It sold out within hours, and something shifted.

"Figured out my art could be a way for someone else to feel what's inside of them that they didn't know was there."

He goes back to that line whenever impostor syndrome shows up.

He calls the work post-photographic, emotional, and human. "It's a little bit uncanny," he says, "like it's something you've seen before, but when you start to put attention into it, something's a little bitoff."

His process runs on rest. He starts with a concept and plays with a text-to-image model, for days or weeks. Then he leaves it alone. He comes back with fresh eyes, keeps what's still lingering, and generates a big body of work. Rests again. Cuts seventy-five to eighty percent of it, then refines the rest in Midjourney, an upscaler, Photoshop, and Lightroom. Rests again, then brings in other people "to see things that I cannot see, my own biases." A final round of curation decides how big the collection will be.

The speed of AI matters to him only because he starts without knowing where he's going, and fast iteration helps him find out. He knows plenty of people still doubt the medium can carry real feeling.

"It's not about the tool. It's about the person behind it."

The new collection started in therapy. Working back through his childhood, he found he could remember how certain things felt but not how they happened. Other memories he was sure of turned out, when he checked with his family, to be wrong in the details, or not to have happened at all.

That became Unfinished Past, a series of participatory, time-based works drawn from his own memories, memories shared by friends and family, and memories strangers posted online. Each is built on something that really happened.

Once a year for seven years, collectors get a question on chain. Answer it, and the piece changes a little, the way a remembered thing does. Some details fade, some shift, and the image mostly holds. Leave it unanswered, and the image slides toward blur, noise, and color. For him that last stage is "emotion without the story," which is what he kept finding in therapy. After year seven the questions stop and each piece stays as it is.

The collector decides whether each memory is "worth remembering or worth forgetting." He wants to know if people feel differently about their piece in year seven than they do now, the way he feels differently about his own past.

Machines can now recall nearly everything. "You're a human, you forget things, and sometimes it's shameful. But sometimes it's something that helps you move forward."

Unfinished Past is a SuperRare curated release. Holders of For Friends and Do Machines Dream of Human Bodies? get first access, presale runs October 12 to 14, and the public release is October 15.

His parting advice: "Do the inefficient thing the inefficient way." He worried that might be too abstract, then remembered something therapy taught him. "If it comes to your mind, it must be for a reason."

He's found music through this segment, so he wanted to pass some along. First, BADBADNOTGOOD, the Canadian jazz band. His favorite, and in his view underrated.

Second, anything by Hermann Hesse. Siddhartha is his favorite.

Third, come to Mexico and go anywhere but Cancún. "There are a bunch of places here in Mexico that have a lot to offer."