In Plague Antenna / early transmission, Jeremy Olson engages Salvador Dalí’s The God of the Bay of Roses as a generative point of departure, channeling its atmosphere of myth and foreboding into a meditation on our own precarious cultural moment. Where Dalí’s painting speaks to the aftermath of war and a world teetering between devotion and absurdity, Olson extends this tension into the twenty-first century, reflecting on collective disillusionment with progress and the fragile promises of technological salvation.

The central “plague antenna” functions as a contemporary Tower of Babel—an architectural fantasy of transcendence and control that risks collapse under the weight of its own hubris. Olson links this form to the quasi-religious optimism of the techno-futurist elite, who envision immortality through digitized consciousness, even as society approaches what he suggests may be a looming AI and tech-bubble collapse. His grotesque yet elegant figuration, hovering between alien and human, positions the work as both warning and allegory: a reminder that our current faith in technology carries echoes of past mythologies of power, progress, and downfall.