A San Francisco Gallery Makes a Medium of Retired Machines

At tiat gallery in San Francisco, a new exhibition titled "Post Generation" takes as its material the artificial intelligence systems that turn written prompts into moving pictures. These tools are replaced so quickly that a version celebrated one season is set aside the next. The artists in the show have gone back to those discarded versions and made work with them. It is a reversal of the usual order, in which the newest release is the only one anyone wants. Here the superseded software becomes the point rather than the problem. For a collector, the show poses a question that the market has only begun to ask: what the record of a tool looks like once that tool has stopped being used. A visitor standing in the gallery is looking at a snapshot of a technology at a particular moment, preserved the way a print preserves a plate.

With reporting from ARTnews.