Gallery Entry
The Artist Is Absent
By Kevin Esherick · US
The Artist Is Absent is a one-year performance in which I stop making art, ceding my artistic practice to an AI model trained on my own work. The piece started with a question, three years ago. What happens when technology can do everything that we can do, but "better"? What happens when it replaces us? What do we do then? Who do we become? I decided to reckon with this question by living it out myself, training an AI model on my own work. Once it was capable of replacing me, I would let it. For one year, a la the great Tehching Hsieh. Now it's ready, and that period began with the opening of my solo show at Heft Gallery earlier this year. The goal was never a tech demo, or even really the art my model is capable of creating. My focus is instead on the one year performance of leaving myself adrift—on how the usurping of our creativity and erosion of our sources of human meaning and connection change us. This has become even more relevant in just the last few weeks, with the tumult in the mathematics community causing uproar as the pace of AI development in their fields threatens to destroy their profession. Those who know me well know that my work is everything to me. It's all-consuming. The prospect of spending a year alienated from it is daunting. This, of course, is exactly why I think it's so important to live out. I'm a conceptual artist, and so the model was trained on my concepts for art pieces. It's then additionally trained on recurring aesthetics and techniques I've developed over the years so that it owns the whole pipeline from idea to visual output for my work. So far, it has participated in six group shows and one solo release over the course of the year, with a series of solo releases with galleries in the works. I haven't made art in 214 days.