Anna Vital

I am an information designer and painter. I cannot live without structure. But structure without chaos is suffocating.

Information design lets me find order in complexity. Painting begins where that order reaches its limit—where intuition, emotion, and the experience of being alive resist being measured or explained.

Go brings these two sides of my work together. Its grid is orderly and its rules are simple, yet the possibilities within it exceed human comprehension. When AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, the game became a way for me to see both the reach of machine intelligence and the limits of human intuition.

But Sedol won one game. His Move 78—judged by AlphaGo to be roughly a one-in-10,000 possibility—left me with a question: If one move in 10,000 was still visible to us, what else might remain possible?

That question became Black to Move, a 19-piece painting series about how we continue to play, create, and live after encountering an intelligence that can see beyond us.

Coming in 2027.

A simul game with Michael Redmond, the first Western Go player to reach professional 9-dan.