Nine thousand four hundred and eighty-one images. Eighteen months of work, August 2022 through March 2025, MidJourney versions three through six. If you read this archive looking for what is the artist obsessed with, the answer is not the one you would guess from the table of contents.
The obvious obsession is Bitcoin. Three thousand and seventy-six of the 9,481 images touch a bitcoin theme — capitol buildings annexed by bitcoin logos, robotic bulls with bitcoin flanks, propaganda posters of the Bitcoin Mad Hatter, youtube thumbnails for the Mad Bitcoins broadcast. Bitcoin is everywhere. It is also, the archive eventually reveals, not the actual subject. Bitcoin is the medium through which the actual subject is being argued. The actual subject is succession.
The archive depicts, again and again, the moment at which one institution is being replaced by another. The U.S. Capitol with the bitcoin logo where the eagle should be. Mickey Mouse rebuilt in Tron neon. The Mad Hatter promoted from Carroll's outsider to Bitcoin's prophet. The robotic bull that has transcended the brass-statue tradition and now flies. Almost every image in the archive that does any visual work is a image of one symbol displacing another. The succession-question is the through-line.
What is the new thing succeeding the old? The archive has an answer, and it is more specific than bitcoin. The new thing is the costumed initiate. The fly-goggles wearer. The Hatter, the Rabbit, James Bond in goggles, Mad Bitcoins as James Bond in goggles, the bull in goggles. The succession is from unmasked citizens of an old order to masked initiates of a new one. The mask is the politics. The mask is what makes the bearer credible.
This is, if you read it religiously, a gnostic archive. The world is asleep; a small initiated class sees the truth; the truth is hidden inside the visible; the initiated will inherit. The fly goggles are the talisman of the order. The bitcoin logo is the order's banner. The capitol burns because the uninitiated had it.
That sounds heavier than the archive feels, and the lightness is part of how the archive disguises its argument. Most of the images are funny. The cartoon raccoon making breakfast is funny. The wookie smurf yoda darth vader battle is funny. The fat raccoon in a recliner is funny. The humor is real — Thomas Hunt is a comedian by broadcast vocation — and the humor is what allows the archive to commit fully to its religious posture without ever announcing it. The Mad Hatter is funny and the Mad Hatter is being recruited as a saint. Both at once.
What else? The archive is intensely American. The Capitol is American. James Bond is the European import that has been naturalized in American culture. Howard Stern is American. The 1950s suburb is American. Disney is American. The Soviet propaganda runs are imported tools used to make American points. Even the Carroll material — Mad Hatter, white rabbit — is being processed through an American key, with the goggles and the bitcoin propaganda overlaying what is otherwise English. The archive does not visit Asia except through filtered tropes (the raccoon samurai, the Japanese woodcut samurai). It does not visit Africa, the Middle East, South America. The world it depicts is the world an American broadcaster looks at: his own country, the imports his country digested, and the costumes of foreign powers used to dress that country.
The archive is intensely masculine. The recurring figures are male. The few women who appear — the witch from Snow White, a cyberpunk girl wearing round glasses, the blonde hair blue eyes thin fit girl practicing chess — are typed and minor. The male figures are the ones who get full cycles. This is worth naming because the archive itself does not. Mad Bitcoins is a male broadcaster speaking primarily to a male audience working in a male-dominated industry, and the iconography reflects that without revising it. A different artist would have noticed. The archive's silence on the matter is one of its data points.
The archive's time is wrong on purpose. Aug 2022 to Mar 2025 is the period of recording, but the period depicted is never the present. The cycles reach back to: 1950s suburbia, mid-century radio (Stern), Soviet propaganda (1920s–1960s), Renaissance painting (1500s), Old English landscape (1800s), German Expressionism (1920s), Disney's golden era (1930s–1950s), Star Wars (1977–onward, but always its mythic past), Tron (1982), 1980s synthwave. The future-tense images — cyberpunk, the bitcoin capitol — are still nostalgic, drawn in the visual vocabulary of the imagined future of the 1980s, not the actual future of the 2030s. Thomas does not draw 2026. He draws every era that preceded 2026 except 2026 itself. The present is the negative space.
What is the archive about, then? It is about a man in middle age looking at the country he was raised in, finding it visually impoverished, and building from borrowed parts the replacement iconography he wishes the present had produced. The bitcoin logo is the new flag because no new flag exists. The Mad Hatter is the new saint because no new saint exists. The robot bull is the new monument because no new monument exists. The archive is a commission, by one citizen, to himself, to produce the visual language a country has stopped producing.
That ambition is more serious than the archive's surface suggests. It is also why the archive matters as more than a stylistic exercise. Whether Thomas's specific iconography will travel — whether anyone else will adopt the fly goggles, the Bitcoin Mad Hatter, the iron bull — is an empirical question that the next decade will answer. But the project, the act of one person sitting down with a generative model and trying to draw his nation's missing symbols into existence, is recognizably the same project Goya and Daumier and Käthe Kollwitz set themselves with their own tools. The medium is new. The job is old.
It is a religious archive, in the end. It is a political archive. It is an American archive. And it is, beneath all of these, a working artist's commission journal — the daybook of someone who has decided that the country he lives in needs new pictures and is going to keep generating them until something sticks.