It won’t be long before our AI overlords take over the creative work, leaving us humans to more rudimentary challenges. Can’t cook? Forget burning your fingers and singeing your hair. Just have AI generate some weird recipe with ground chuck, bananas, and cottage cheese for the protein content. Can’t write? No need to research. Most of our libraries will probably close soon, anyway. Fire up that prompt generator instead, and in five seconds, you’ll have a limp noodle of an essay even your mom wouldn’t want to read.
I kid, of course. Sort of. We’re still in the early phases of understanding the long-term ramifications of technology on our financial stability, mental health, and sense of self. But it’s exactly that uncertainty that’s making us lose our collective shit. A recent paper by Harvard economists David Deming and Lawrence H. Summers suggests evidence of a major AI-related shakeup in the job market, triggering widespread anxiety in an already uncertain workforce. There’s also a growing body of research suggesting generative AI can and will outpace the average human in many artistic and analytical fields. Encouragingly, this research also found that the most creative human responses still outshine AI’s best ideas—but the damage was already done. Terrifying headlines ensued, proclaiming that “AI is already more creative than YOU.” Ouch. No wonder existential anxiety is on the rise.
Our August exhibition explores the complex relationship between digital technology and the human experience. As the digital world steadily supplants the real world as the center of our culture, the artists featured in Every Emotion All at Once pause to reflect on the warmth of genuine connection, the isolating effects of living in a digital-centric culture, and our longing to experience feelings that are genuine, raw, and sometimes painful. Together, their work offers a break from the flood of information and distraction, or captures the cacophony of emotions that crop up when the world spins too fast to process joy or grief.
Scroll through to learn more about the artists in Every Emotion All at Once, then view the exhibition via the button below.
Mad Gaiety and Wild Joy
In a world grown paralyzed by introspection and constipated by unwholesome mental diets, unadulterated joy, wild extravagance, and mad gaiety are decidedly off-menu. Like a vitalizing current of neon-colored blood, Scott Pennington’s interactive assemblage “The Midway” glows and whirs in the dark as children shriek with glee in its periphery. Craig Hansen looks for distraction in “Everything’s F*cked (Surf’s) Up,” a hallucinogenic oceanscape dunked in warm, melted acrylics. Elsewhere, Ellen Langford’s hazy acrylic landscape, “Where There’s Joy,” plants our feet firmly on the ground, still starry-eyed, but wise enough to stop and pat a good dog on the head when the opportunity presents itself.
Existentialism and Disconnection in the Digital Era
Described as a weapon of “mass distraction,” the internet offers a near-infinite supply of entertainment produced for convenience and consumption, rather than reflection or creativity. That’s sure to trigger something akin to the twitching, dripping bundle of anxieties in video editor Bobby Abate’s stream-of-consciousness meditation on his career in “Reality TV.” Or the fractured sensation cleverly hidden behind contact in Clarissa Abelarde’s oil painting “Interconnected.” Katie Nichols extends the metaphor in “Prismanic,” an unsettling, broken-mirror collage inspired by fame and its endless buffet of body parts for sale.
Chaos, Exhaustion, and Burnout
It starts with stutter. Then it sputters out, a dead end, a double-ended cul-de-sac in the shape of your brain. Instead of flashing an ERROR message, Christopher Hartshorne offers us “Brain Be Like,” an eerily prescient phrase nicked from a public bathroom stall and repurposed for a painting of the same name. In “Molecular Chaos,” CJ Hungerman slides our shattered nerves under a microscope for all the world to see in a piece that resembles an alien obstacle course far more than a flat painting.
Grief, Anxiety, and Depression
In a dark room, a dark figure lies motionless in a bath filled with dark red liquid. His shirt, which he never bothered to remove, is also dark, soaked in a substance that is definitely not water. Even the decorative wallpaper in Arda Ergin’s “Küvet (Pool)” seems soggy, weighed down by humidity from hot baths and darkened by years of depression. Its presence feels permanent, familiar, an old friend who’s always got a cigarette for you. In Anna Cee’s watercolor series “Grief Scapes,” the shape of her sorrow, familiar at first, transmutes with every iteration, still staining the paper beneath with blooms of color.
All images published with permission of the artist(s); feature graphic for Every Emotion All at Once: David Schwartz.
