MORE.zip

With each technological advance, the ‘reality’ that photography documents something inherently real, that really happened, comes into further question. Images and artworks using Artificial Intelligence processes throw that uncertainty in our collective faces, forcing us to embrace the photographic future we’re inevitably faced with. Is it photography altered by AI, or is the AI mimicking photography, or does it matter at all?

In every generation, the artistic avant garde distances itself from classification, and never before has there been such fluidity across definitions of media, material, and the aesthetics thereof. With such openness, and given the options and volume that these new processes affords, there is no limit to how much more we will see. MORE.zip assembles evidence of these new extremes with works imagined by artists at the forefront of generative AI post photography, each interrogating the infinite possibilities we now seem destined for.

These series contemplate a world saturated with pop culture and meme-induced madness, where there’s no limit to what we’ll see next – only the inevitability that there will be MORE. From this reality, MORE.zip pushes the boundaries of cultural lexicon and thematic imagery to new extremes of surreality, taking the familiar and twisting it into strange reinterpretations of iconic symbols and situations from our world. It’s the absurd, recursively reworked to become even more absurd – an asymptotic convergence of history, tropes, and novelty that appear to reach their maximum: from subtle to shocking, the perpetually new 11.

The artists in this exhibition have gone big, past discomfort, and now the cultural extremes of their works help us acknowledge and then file the madness away, compressing it down until it's nothing next to the next thing. If comfort is a warm embrace, the artworks that come from these compressed folders are a suffocating bear hug – too close for comfort but truly intimate. They’re made because they can be, and because we always want MORE.

This is what maximalism is: it’s about what more can we do, what more can we push, how far can we exaggerate, and can we go so far that it all dissolves back into normalcy again? In this effort, we discover that we actually find familiarity, and maybe even comfort, in the most sensational expressions of life and art.

A provocation of new extremes, this exhibition is a future time capsule depicting the limits of what we’re ready to imagine in this moment. Fueled by generative processes and a little bit scary, these works are the means with which each of these artists creates their statement – perhaps the catalyst – for what comes next.