The Russell Brown Pre-Con MAX 2025 event showcased a creative collaboration between Adobe and Epson, featuring over 80 unique tarot card designs created by students during Russell Brown’s hands-on Adobe MAX pre-conference class. Each card served as a personal self-portrait, blending AI, Photoshop, and Firefly tools into imaginative visual storytelling. The exhibition integrated augmented reality powered by Zappar, allowing visitors to bring each artwork to life through animation and sound. Set within a castle-themed gallery, (shown above) the installation embodied Brown’s signature mix of theatrical design, cutting-edge technology, and playful artistic exploration—celebrating bold new ways to merge creativity and innovation.
Dan @ Adobe MAX
I had the unique opportunity to collaborate with Russell Preston Brown and his apprentices at Adobe MAX 2025, leading a pre-conference session that focused on the fusion of AI-generated animation and augmented reality, showing how static designs can evolve into dynamic, interactive storytelling experiences. Participants learned hands-on techniques to bring their AI-enhanced visuals to life using Zappar-powered AR, bridging the worlds of photography, illustration, and motion into a new realm of immersive expression.
Pick a Card any Card! Scan the one QR code below then scroll throught the 12 cards to the right holding your phone to the screen... Not to be missed!
The series of shots below captures the surreal beauty and creative spirit of a desert adventure led by Adobe’s Russell Brown in the days leading up to Adobe MAX. One of the key reasons for our multiple trips into the desert and mountains was to experiment with light painting, using long exposures and moving light sources to transform the landscape into living canvases of color and motion. Set against the haunting expanse of the Salton Sea, the images document artists exploring the intersection of imagination and environment, turning abandoned structures, strange sculptures, and cinematic light into a collaborative art experience. From solitary figures and sculptural relics to quiet moments of reflection and play, the photographs reveal a landscape illuminated by creativity, curiosity, and the boundless energy that defines Russell Brown’s legendary pre-MAX adventures.
The series of images below represents a reimagined evolution of the images above, where documentary photography meets generative transformation. Using AI image prompting, multiple real moments from our trips with Russell Brown were blended, recontextualized, and re-lit to create surreal composites that extend the story beyond what the camera captured. Sculptural elements, tentacles, musical instruments, and symbolic doors emerge from the desert floor, fusing human presence with mythic forms. These AI interpretations preserve the mood and spatial memory of the Salton Sea while introducing a dreamlike logic, turning the landscapes, light-painting experiments, and spontaneous scenes into cinematic visions of imagination unbound.
The Legacy Show
My Legacy Show celebrated the ongoing conversation between photography and technology. Rather than a look back, it revealed how each new tool - from film to mobile to AI - opens fresh ways to tell visual stories. Through layered imagery and augmented reality, the work invited viewers to experience the evolution of seeing itself, how curiosity, not technology, has always been the true driving force behind my art.
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Daniel Marcolina LLC is a creative lab specialising in designing, educating, and consulting on visual experiences-exploring generative and augmented digital mediums as both fine art and compelling storytelling.
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