Thermal Shutdown with David Sullivan :: David Sullivan

ABOUT ANIMALS OF EARTH (exhibition publication): This book is an act of resurrection — or at least, a ghostly approximation of one. Each image within these pages is a collaboration between historical record and artificial intelligence, attempting to conjure creatures that human hands have driven into oblivion. Inspired by John James Audubon’s meticulous renderings of North America’s birds, this collection asks us to look closely at what we can no longer see and no computer can recapture.

EXHIBITION STATEMENT: There is no intelligence in AI. There are no aesthetics or qualitative judgements. It is all patterns of information.

In 2022, I started experimenting with the large language models we generally call AI, in the form of web based image diffusers. I was curious how these technologies could be used as part of the creative process. The image generators at that time had many quirks and abstractions. I found these errors to be interesting visually, and as reminders of the limits of representation. When I first began working with AI, it felt like sketching with lightning. Ideas could multiply in seconds, branching into dozens of directions that would have taken me weeks or months to pursue on my own. In that acceleration, I found freedom: the chance to wander further into possibility, to finally flesh out images that I had  in my sketchbook, and to let chance and machine logic surprise me. 

But this exhilaration also carries shadows. These tools are built on vast archives of human labor—images, texts, and voices gathered without permission. They carry with them the biases and blind spots of the data they feed on, sometimes reflecting back caricatures and falsehoods rather than truths. And behind the enticing capabilities lies a heavy infrastructure: the energy burned, the water drained, the planetary cost of keeping these engines humming.

So these works live in tension. They are both a celebration of what new tools can do and a reminder of the weight they carry. AI can expand what art is and who can make it, but it also forces us to reckon with the material, ethical, and social frameworks in which art now exists. This exhibition is less a final word than an open question: how might we use these powerful tools with care, responsibility, and imagination?

We have to decide how we want AI to be used in the world.

David Sullivan uses computers to explore how people change the world around them. His work has previously shown at the McNay Museum in San Antonio, TX, Lawndale in Houston TX, the Soap Factory in Minneapolis, MN, the Ogden Museum and has been featured in The Oxford American, Wired.com, and Artforum.com. He lives in New Orleans.