HERME-C, the Hermetika farms A.I. Juice
Hermetika Farms A.I. Juice is a fictional branding and art direction project built on a simple, uncomfortable premise: in the creative market, ideas are commodity. The head that produces them, packaging.
The product is an energy drink whose bottle is shaped like the creator’s own face. The liquid inside is red. It looks like blood. The visual language is that of beverage advertising — saturated, enthusiastic, compulsive — pressed against a concept that hollows it from within. The references are Marc Quinn, who cast his own head in frozen blood; Chris Cunningham, who wears the costume of commercial entertainment to smuggle in body horror; and Roger Ballen, whose photography dissolves the line between the grotesque and the familiar. The brand mascot is an androgynous, brooding creature built in layers: the creator’s own face, Ballen’s aesthetic, Cunningham’s visual universe. Smile too wide. Flowers in the hair. Face tattoo.
The entire project was produced using generative artificial intelligence — the “A.I.” in the name is not a footnote. It’s the argument.
Ref #1 – Marc Quinn blood head sculpture:
Marc Quinn In 1991, Quinn cast his own head using 4.5 liters of his frozen blood. The sculpture exists only while refrigerated — switch off the power, lose the art. Identity as a perishable substance.
Ref #2 – “Kool-Aid Man” Character:
Kool-Aid Man A smiling pitcher that exists solely to burst through walls and serve others. The original head-shaped container. The original mascot whose entire purpose is to be consumed.
Ref #4 – Aphex Twin’s Chris Cunningham aesthetic:
Aphex Twin / Chris Cunningham In Come to Daddy (1997), Cunningham dressed a music video in the language of pop entertainment and filled it with something feral. The format stays recognizable. The content does not.
Ref #4 – Roger Ballen decay aesthetic:
Roger Ballen South African photographer whose constructed environments collapse the distance between the grotesque and the mundane. In his world, nothing is purely disturbing — and nothing is entirely safe.
Packaging / Product design
The packaging started with the most available raw material: the creator’s own face. Directly referencing Marc Quinn’s Self — a head cast from the artist’s own blood — the concept was translated into a 3D model built from reference photos, rendered with a translucent plastic texture and gradually shaped into a functional bottle form. The container grew a cap, a body, small arms. The head became an object. The object became a product. The product went into mass production.
Branding / Logo
The HERME-C® visual identity was built to pass as a real consumer product — and that’s precisely the point. The logotype is bold, industrial, and immediately familiar: red, black and white, the classic color system of beverages that want to be trusted. The mascot illustration reduces the 3D head-bottle into a flat, cartoonish figure — friendly enough to sit on a shelf, unsettling enough to make you look twice. Multiple lockups were developed for horizontal, vertical and label applications, giving the brand the kind of systematic coherence that mass-market products demand.
Campaign Applications (test)
This is where the concept closes the loop. The campaigns reproduce the exact visual structure of beverage advertising — composition, typography, saturated palette, compulsive joy — and fill that structure with the product’s actual proposition: a head full of blood, consumed with enthusiasm. One image shows a smiling woman drinking from the bottle, thumbs up. The other shows the brand mascot — tattooed, unsettling, grinning — holding the creator’s head in his hands. Both are selling the same thing. The format is trustworthy. What it contains is not. That tension is the work.
Social Media
