In 2012, Tupac Shakur appeared at Coachella — sixteen years after his death. Projected as a hologram, he moved, rapped, and greeted the crowd. It was a striking moment: a presence without a body, a performance without a performer. It was a fracture in the assumed boundaries between body and image, past and present, real and unreal.

That moment shaped a thesis I wrote the same year. The hologram became a way to explore how “nature” — and reality itself — is constructed through cultural categories: human/machine, organic/artificial, material/immaterial. These binaries have long shaped how we understand the world. But what happens when technologies start to dissolve them?

The hologram disturbed these boundaries. AI, now, does something even more profound. It doesn’t just blur authorship or redistribute agency — it recasts our assumptions about meaning, presence, and even identity. We’re not simply outsourcing creativity; we’re redrawing the outlines of what counts as human, or natural, or real.

Looking back, the hologram was never just a technical novelty. It was an early signal of a deeper shift — one that AI is now accelerating. If anything, it reminds us that our realities have always been assembled, mediated, and more fluid than we’d like to admit.