The Creative Remix

Pablo Picasso, Pharrell Williams, and AI share the same creative instinct: sample widely, remix fearlessly, and rebuild into something new. Here’s why we think AI is a mirror that reflects back our own creativity.

The Anxiety Around AI

Many creatives are feeling anxious right now. With AI generating artwork, music, and writing at lightning speed, it can feel like the machine is outpacing us and threatening our very jobs and identities. Could it really replace us?

Let's step back for a moment. Consider that some of history’s greatest artists were already working like AI… long before AI existed. We'll explain.

Picasso: The Fearless Reassembler

Pablo Picasso is remembered as the father of Cubism, but his genius wasn’t about inventing forms out of thin air. His gift was pulling from everywhere: African sculpture, classical painting, folk traditions, and even children’s drawings.

He broke these influences apart and recombined them into a new visual language— Cubism— that shifted the course of modern art. And he didn’t stop there. Over his lifetime, Picasso produced more than 20,000 works, constantly remixing and reassembling until something new emerged.

His creativity wasn’t about purity. It was about transformation.

Pharrell: Master of the Remix

Fast forward a century and you’ll find Pharrell Williams using the same instinct in music and beyond. Pharrell pulls from gospel, skate culture, Bauhaus design, hip-hop, and Japanese minimalism.

It shouldn’t work, but it does. The results are tracks that feel both fresh and timeless, collaborations that span music, fashion, and product design, and a career defined by curiosity. Pharrell’s genius is collage: blending elements across genres and disciplines until they click into something irresistible.

Appropriation or Appreciation?

Let's be clear: we do not advocate for cultural appropriation.

We believe that drawing inspiration from other cultural traditions can have a deeply educational effect when done respectfully, broadening our perspective and exposing us to new ways of seeing. Design doesn’t exist in isolation; it’s shaped by the exchange of ideas, materials, and cultures across time and place.

At Dwelden, we look to the work of Isamu Noguchi and the traditions of Japanese origami and rice paper lanterns as touchstones. Their balance of lightness, structure, and restraint continues to influence how we think about form. But we don’t replicate those designs or claim them as our own. Instead, we reinterpret them through our own lived experience, transforming time-honored principles into something new and rooted in the California desert.

The result is a kind of creative dialogue: paper lamps that honor the spirit of their inspirations while reflecting the textures, rhythms, and light of the place we call home.

The Common Thread

Picasso and Pharrell lived in different centuries, worked in different mediums, and spoke in different languages of art. But their creative process shares a common DNA:

Take everything in.
Break it apart.
Build something new.

Coincidentally, this is exactly how AI works.

AI as a Creative Mirror

Generative AI trains on massive inputs. It ingests humanity’s collective creativity, breaks it down into fragments, and recombines patterns into new outputs.

That’s why AI took off first in images: visual making is remix at its core. Just like Pharrell producing a track. Just like Picasso reinventing form.

AI doesn’t “invent” from nothing. It connects, recombines, and reflects back what humans have always done (and will always do) at scale.

What This Means for Creatives

Instead of thinking of AI as a rival, maybe we can see it as a mirror. It shows us that creativity has always been about recombination, not originality in a vacuum.

The lesson?