27/05/2026
And our final 2026 Taliesin Prize winner is Raphael Tourette, concentrator in Applied Math (CS) with a secondary in History of Art and Architecture.
"My coursework has explored the process of building, by and for humans.
The master masons of Notre-Dame raised 226 feet of stone without standardized measurement, guided only by geometry and a determination to build something greater than themselves. The cathedral was a technological advancement allowing humans to approach the divine. Its recent reconstruction prompted debate about whether France ought to preserve the edifice’s Catholic heritage under laïcité — an argument reaching the national government as well as my French family’s dinner table.
Photography handed the next generation a technology that reshaped how people understood their world. The Soviet and N**i regimes weaponized photomontage and mass-printing to systematically manufacture belief. Unlike painting, the assembled photograph claimed reality by placing the viewer inside the image, collapsing the distance between fiction and truth. The same medium, in different hands, became an instrument of refusal. In 1920s Paris, Claude Cahun staged self-portraits that shattered every category her era used to contain her, turning Surrealism's own grammar against its tendency to reduce women to objects.
Each of these builders absorbed the world deeply enough to see what it was ready for next, where their inventions became the environment everyone else lived inside. The same patterns recur in the mathematics underneath AI, where optimization and probabilistic algorithms encode human judgment into systems that can shape human thinking at scale. I study applied mathematics and computation because those are the materials of this moment, while I turn to art history to learn how to build towards human progress."
