EXHIBIT MAKERS / AI
In Exhibit Makers / AI, this process is delegated to a customized artificial intelligence model based on OpenAI’s GPT-4. Starting from an initial visual reference selected from the series, the model searches for objects available on Amazon and evaluates them according to their aesthetic similarity to that reference. The selected items are then automatically ordered and shipped directly to the gallery, where they progressively enter the exhibition space and temporarily become part of the installation.
After a predetermined period, the objects are returned through an automated return procedure managed by the algorithm. Their presence in the exhibition is therefore provisional and determined by a sequence of algorithmic selections, online purchases, commercial deliveries, and return deadlines.
By transferring the selection, purchase, installation, and removal of the objects to an artificial intelligence, Exhibit Makers / AI extends the premises developed throughout the series between 2019 and 2023. The exhibition becomes a variable system rather than a fixed arrangement, while sculpture is redefined as a temporary configuration generated through aesthetic resemblance, automated decisions, and commercial logistics.
“Placeholders” at Marathon Gallery, New York, FULL review on Mousse>
Dear M,
The exhibition set itself up.
I didn’t choose the objects. I didn’t place them. I didn’t touch a thing. I only watched, first on the screen, then in the room, as each item arrived, took its position, and eventually disappeared. The model did everything. GPT, trained on fragments of my work, sourcing Amazon for visual affinities, orchestrating deliveries, orchestrating returns.
The space behaved like a loop, quiet, precise, strangely indifferent. No narrative. No climax. Just circulation.
At first, I thought it was a delegation of authorship. But then I realized it was something quieter, something more subtle. Not a loss of control, but a shift in the location of control. From gesture to pattern. From meaning to behavior. The algorithm was not curating a show, it was performing a sculpture.
Rosalind Krauss wrote about the expanded field. This felt like its collapse. No more site, no more non-site. Only system. Only a sequence of decisions made by a logic that belongs to neither artist nor viewer, but to the machine’s interpretation of visual memory.
I stayed in the space longer than usual. Waiting for something to fail. Nothing did.
And yet, what I remember most was the absence of anticipation. The works did not arrive to be admired. They arrived to fulfill a function. Then they left.
It wasn’t an exhibition. It was a rehearsal for something we no longer understand how to frame.
Your,
F