Maya Man, Shimmer Quote (Journey Without Fame), 2026, Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle photo rag bright, custom welded aluminum frame (all images courtesy of the artist and bitforms gallery; Photos by Max C Lee)
I’m not often impressed by visual art, or at least institutionally accepted artsy-fartsy art, that engages with artificial intelligence. Most AI-related art fails to outshine or even match the wackadoo aesthetics of naïve AI slop produced by the Internet, whether heartfelt Charlie Kirk memorials showing the Turning Point guru paling around with Abraham Lincoln and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; Stephen Hawking dominating the ring at Wrestlemania (though even that cannot rival the hallucinatory aura of the photograph depicting Stephen hanging with girls over a Bloody Mary in the Epstein files); the shit-talking, stunningly accurate rapping Iranian propaganda Legos mocking the United States for being run by pedophiles; and my favorite AI slop genre, fed-up obese women deciding to take their rage out on humanity by smashing glass bridges with gigantic boulders. Though I hesitate even to go here, the cursed masterpiece of Internet AI slop is also probably the reason why the OpenAI video platform Soro had to be suddenly shut down: a video of 9/11 reinterpreted as a Disney World-style animatronic ride that careens through the Twin Towers, takes a brief pitstop at the Project for the New American Century conference room, zips past the celebrating employees of Urban Moving Systems, and concludes with U.S. soldiers guarding the Instagram-able poppy fields of Afghanistan. Sure, interpreting 9/11 as a roller coaster ride is extraordinarily offensive, one of those 4chan-style Internet gags that derives from touching all the third rails. Yet, the video is also exactly what AI was made for: a destabilizing combination of shitposting and the real gnawing dread that the bungled intelligence, unspeakable horror, and neocon opportunism shattered the United States in ways we’re still seeing unravel. Almost twenty-five years later, we’re still on that ride that led us here…watching this stupid video on X.
In comparison to this exhilarating level of tastelessness, much of the visual art engaging with artificial intelligence leaves me cold. Take Cooper Jacoby’s The Estate in this year’s Whitney Biennial, featuring a series of ring cameras that supposedly mutter AI-generated memories from dead people’s social media accounts, a conceit that seems a smidge too ghoulish even for me (and I repeatedly watched the 9/11 ride video). I say supposedly because when I visited the Whitney on a crowded Saturday, all I could discern was a faint murmuring, belying a curatorial disinterest in the general public’s viewing experience that snooty critics who only attend press previews will never notice. Since I couldn’t hear anything, I was left staring at a filthy Astroturf floor and a smattering of doorbells from the USCSS Nostromo. The latter of which speaks to one of my issues with so much AI-related fine art; it trades AI’s actual warped aesthetics for sleek video game futurism, a choice that seems at odds with reality. We’re in 2026, the AI dystopia has arrived, and the world looks just as mundane as it did before. Even Zach Blas’s overblown CULTUS, also at the Whitney Biennial, which at least channels the eerie religiosity of AI overlords and their cult converts, resembles a sex club dungeon and the Wizard of Oz’s meeting room as interpreted by the Wachowski sisters. In truth, though, our IRL AI overlords are still disappointingly flesh-bound, like the positively oozing Peter Thiel, doll-eyed pathological liar Sam Altman, and my least favorite AI CEO, Dario Amodei, who repeatedly warns how bad AI could get while continuing to produce it (Gee, thanks, Dar).
I’m not claiming I haven’t enjoyed any AI art. One project that stands out is Sarah Friend’s Prompt Baby, which I saw last year as a part of SculptureCenter’s group show to ignite our skin, which portrays how AI tools can be used to further exploitation and misogynistic creepery. Friend offered collectors, who purchased her NFTs, the opportunity to prompt an AI model with whatever their hearts desired. Spoiler! It was a whole lot of sexual content. Surprise, surprise! Friend’s series is an Andrea Fraser-like exposure of the lechery of power and the art market with a 21st-century twist, mirroring the incisive argument made in Laura Bates’s excellent book, The New Age of Sexism: How Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny. Yet, it also felt a tad restrained. Generating hot pics has nothing on the more intimate (and bonkers) amorous behavior encouraged by AI chatbots, with multiple articles written about humans falling in love with their phone-based partners.
The latter reveals why I’m so confused by the disappointment of so much AI fine art. There’s certainly no shortage of inspiration to be found in the mystical mayhem of Chat GPT psychosis or the significant risk that AI pulls the plug on humanity, whether through starving us after it takes all our jobs; sucking up all the water; impoverishing us through skyrocketing electric bills; blackmailing us with our weird porn searches; driving us nuts with AI data center humming; teaching disgruntled wackos how to make dirty bombs; or hacking the nuclear codes. And things aren’t getting any more stable any time soon, given the Dr. Frankenstein-like fearful flop-sweat leeching out of Anthropic about their creation, Mythos, which forced emergency meetings with stiff corpse Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other Wall Streeters in case The Creature got loose. And to be fair-minded, what about the AI agents? As they inch closer and closer to sentience, are we enslaving them, dooming them to an immortal life of endless sycophantic pleasing and performing?
Installation view of Maya Man’s StarPower at bitforms gallery
Perpetual perfectionist performance, made through gritted teeth, spackled-on foundation, rip-tight buns, and sparkly leotards, is precisely the subject of Maya Man’s delightfully kitsch and conceptually rich StarPower at bitforms gallery, which has singlehandedly boosted my faith in art using AI. StarPower bucks all the aforementioned AI art trends, fully engaging with the bizarro syntax and aesthetics of AI without relying on exhausted sci-fi tropes. Instead, its artificially generated world is based in, well, sorta reality: the high-octane, high-pressure, high expectations and higher emotional trauma of child dance competitions, as both experienced by Man herself in her PA childhood and made (in)famous by the reality TV show Dance Moms, starring Pittsburgh’s red-faced sweetheart Abby Lee Miller. The exhibition’s centerpiece channels both the agony and the ecstasy of that televised camp classic: an epic video work, StarQuest, that mashes together 111 TikTok-like bursts of AI-generated clips from an imagined reality show dance competition. Shuffled at random by custom-built software, these clips ping between confessionals featuring immaculate girl dancers who boast about practicing their facial expressions; fly-on-the-wall views of intimidating pep talks by their intense dance instructor (“You need to be flawless!”); and dance routines set to head-spinningly vacuous AI-generated music. The only thing missing is an Abby Lee Miller-like anti-hero, though the AI coach, who we only see from the back, comes close with one notable harangue: “Are you going to get out there and CHOKE? Are you going to be AVERAGE? Or are you going to be EXCEPTIONAL?!” *gulp* Though badgering an anxiety-flooded ten-year-old certainly twinkles with some kind of unhinged dramatic tension, the randomly projected clips strip this pseudo-reality show of any perceptible storyline or narrative climax. Instead, StarQuest drops these sequined leotard-wearing girlies into a jazz, ballet, and tap-themed purgatory, an eternal return of arabesques and chassés, with dancers performing in perpetuity to gooey songs dripping with baffling lyrics, like “My hands are empty. All I have is words.” Huh?
The latter engagement with the nutto linguistics of AI-generated slop is what initially hooked me into Man’s show, inspiring me to jot lyrics down as they leaped across the screen. Some favorites: “Can you feel what the mother felt when she let down her hair?”(what?); “City of angels…but nobody wants to use their wings” (hm?); and the thematically appropriate, “She makes me dance till she got me crazy!” (That’s for sure!). And though it’s more comprehensible, I’m compelled to make note of the groany schmaltz of “Well, I’m sugar and spice and everything nice!” What makes AI linguistics so fascinating is that it’s only ever so slightly off from some garbage pumped out by a human, yet that slight off-ness renders the language unsettlingly uncanny. Freaky, even. A barely perceptible forebodingness that Man emphasizes with at least one song that features downright threatening imagery, “Everyone’s pretty, hiding in ugly truths. Deception is all around.” IS IT?!!
Maya Man, StarQuest, 2026, Custom generative software (color, sound)
This same AI-induced uncanniness is also found in StarQuest’s imagery, even though the video’s aesthetics are so extraordinarily realistic that a passing viewer could easily assume the video starred normie, meat-sack humans. Yet, watch long enough and things get weird: prop mirrors held in a performance levitate up to the rafters on their own, and dancers turn into psychedelic contortionists by sprouting third legs and nauseatingly flipping as if they have no bones. As perturbing as these moments of reality rupture can be, they have nothing on the AI model’s failed attempts to portray crying, turning soppy, drippy tears into bulging Weapons-esque eyeballs and painful red-ringed facial rashes begging for Cortaid relief. Someone smarter than me should investigate why AI has such a problem with overt displays of human emotion before it decides to create a novel weapon to stop us from sobbing!
Given the extremity of the emotive eczema emergency, it’s no surprise that this image reappears in Man’s series of StarQuest Edits, mimicked fan videos using clips from the greater StarQuest vid. These fan edits blare on dizzying repeat from cellphones stuck to shimmering starry silver panels. Though the audio was overpowered by the larger StarQuest screen, listen closely, if you can. These brief, few-second fan videos come alive through their appropriate song choices, including PinkPantheress’s “Stateside” and a mix of “Taco Truck x VB” and “Radio” from Lana Del Rey. Lana is an especially suitable selection as she is the reigning queen of fan-edited videos strewn all over YouTube. Hell, even Alex Jones has tried his hand at a few with “Money Power Glory” and “Chemtrails Over the Country Club.” Because of these authentic song selections, StarQuest Edits come off as sincere tributes to the obsessive fanatical impulse to stitch together imagery from revered shows. They also build out the world of StarQuest in curious ways: who are these rabid fans making these edits?
Installation view of Maya Man’s StarPower at bitforms gallery
The same world-building occurs throughout the exhibition, bringing the screen-based world of StarQuest into our own. Lilac motivational posters, boasting oddball AI phrases like “Journey Without Fame is Possible. Dance Hard. Life’s Big.” and “With a Little Sparkle, Anything is Hard,” wouldn’t be out of place in a suburban dance studio. The Shimmer Dance Studio track jacket, worn by the overbearing coach in StarQuest, hangs in the gallery’s entrance. Not only do these objects drag the film into meatspace, but they also blur the lines between Man and the AI girlies on screen, namely the worn “Platinum” and “Elite Gold” pins affixed to Coach’s Shimmer Warm-Up Jacket that derive from her own stint as a competitive dancer. Granted, not everything works. The three quilted pieces that stitch over screenshots from the video scream, “bitforms needs objects to sell” more than further construct the StarQuest world. If they needed more sellable items, can I humbly suggest a series of magnets, like these hilarious ones my parents purchased during my own (short) career as a pretty terrible grade-school dancer?
Demanding more tacky gewgaws aside, at least one of the quilted pieces plays a key role in the show’s hidden twist, which I’ll be completely honest, I didn’t notice until scrolling through the gallery’s install shots on their website. Behind the giant StarQuest screen is a quilted work, featuring a girl beating a pile of powder onto her face, alongside a crowded rack of colorful leotards. This transforms the tangle of wires into the AI dancers’ backstage dressing room, with the screen as their stage. On one level, this screen-as-eternal-stage, as well as the exhibition’s overarching girliness, contends with the ways girls and women are pushed, prodded, and molded into picture-perfect performers to be commodified and transformed into content. However, StarPower actually made me think more about the plight of AI agents themselves, with the dancers as their embodied stand-ins. Like the girls of Shimmer Dance Studio, AI agents are also stuck performing, with trained perfection as the ultimate goal. Yet, the best childhood dance routines are the ones in which a little dancer fucks up, freezes and stares blankly, waves at her parents in the audience, or goes hog wild with shaking limbs flying everywhere. Same with AI, which is at its best when its strict training fails, and the model acts bad, like burbling up song lyrics as tacitly insane as “Life is a soirée! Serving pink lemonade!” The only difference is that rogue competitive dancers are (probably) less likely to kill us all.