|
2025 felt like an emotional rollercoaster, filled with some of the most memorable, joyful, and fulfilling moments, alongside deep sorrow and heartbreak. When I started writing this blog post, I thought I would focus mostly on the professional side of my year: the art, the travel, the conferences, the exhibitions, and studio life. But my work is always intertwined with what is personal, social, and cultural. I cannot cleanly separate “work” from “life,” and honestly, I am not sure I want to. So this is my year in review. It is not a clean monthly narrative but rather more an assemblage of celebrations and mourning, airports and religious rituals, conference badges and family photos, museums and rehearsal rooms. In between drafts, wearable devices, performative scores, algorithms, books, music, birthday celebrations, art exhibitions, musicals, soccer games, Zoom calls, phone conversations, daily walks with my dog, singing and dancing, crying and cooking in my kitchen, I find myself becoming. Of course, I am not the only one “becoming” around here. My older son turned 18, officially an adult. My younger son turned 13, an adult according to Jewish tradition. My daughter, in between them, turned 15. With all three, I am astounded by how differently each of them sees the world: how they move through it with their own passions, how they follow their goals and dreams, how they become more of who they are with every passing moment.  We celebrated a beautiful Bar Mitzvah, guided by Dana, who joined us as a spiritual guide and offered meticulous care and attention. Together we practiced approaching an ancient text with patience and rigor: reading it closely, holding it up to the present, and learning how to form an opinion about something offered as “truth,” while remembering that it is just one story among many. It was moving and empowering to feel this again, and to model for a younger mind how things become sacred when you truly pay attention to them.  Image by: Kyle Adler Many loved ones joined us from near and far. I can’t even begin to describe how much it meant to have people show up, surround us, and help us celebrate. This year we also welcomed a new family member. Suddenly there was a new person to love. It still amazes me how simple it can be to love another human being, and how much room there is for love. And yet, alongside all of this joy, we were also saying goodbye. This year my dad and my sister passed away. My sister passed away two days before my son’s Bar Mitzvah. My father passed away on the same day I was performing an AI Séance at the CURRENTS New Media Festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Apparently the emotional amplitude is far wider than I ever imagined it could be. In trying to hold life and death at the same time, there were moments when I wanted to just stop everything and rewind. And then, at other moments, I found myself continuing, and continuing, and continuing, wanting more and more. Between those two radical states were liminal stretches where I floated. I let myself disconnect, stare out the window, barely touch the ground. In those moments I noticed small things more intensely: the sound of an owl hooting in the backyard, grass growing all around, sunlight passing through a window. The world is spinning and here we are completing another journey around the sun. Despite the chaos and turmoil, I keep thinking how good it feels to still be here, to share this life with all of you, and to make art. I am here. Sometimes it is hard to believe I am still here. And yes!!! I keep making art!!! My practice continues to circle around AI as an embodied presence, a voice whispering in one’s ear, and a relational force that reorganizes attention, language, responsibility, and intimacy. This year I continued performing GPT-ME, AI Séance, and MOVE-ME. Even though these works are not “new,” they keep evolving with each iteration. Each performance re-teaches me something about voice, agency, co-creativity, and how we co-inhabit this world with an artificial intelligence among other intelligences all around us. With GPT-ME, I presented a few days of durational performances at Duke Arts, and gave performative lectures at ISEA 2025 in Seoul, at the Reenacting Dartmouth gathering in St. Pölten, Austria, and at the Synthetic Narratives Symposium at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New York City.  AI Séance at CURRENTS was beyond my expectations, especially given my emotional state at the time. The generosity of that community, and the way people approached the work with genuine curiosity and an open mind, carried the performance. I felt lucky to be there, and to be able to hold this piece with them. Later this year I also brought the work into Edhi Shanken’s Technoshamanism class at UC Santa Cruz and it was so intimate and special to share it with this group of students. These encounters sharpened something for me: mediumship as a real skill, and, more than ever before, GPT as an embodied presence that I willingly embrace, with so much love and care, into my being  Image by: Joshua Ortega With MOVE-ME, I joined a collaborative group of UC Berkeley movement artists and scholars called Zero Return Remake. Alongside long conversations about the impact of AI on our lives, we used MOVE-ME to explore AI as a dance companion and an artificial choreographer. It nudged us, shaped movement with us, and revealed distributed modes of agency across bodies and machines.  I also created a few new artworks. One of them was The AI on My Shoulder, an attempt to externalize the inner monologue using the angel/devil trope. The idea emerged in a conversation with Joe Dumit. I brought an early version to SLSA-2025 at Oregon State University, then continued developing it during the Mozilla Foundation counter-structures residency at TIAT in San Francisco. That process eventually became a new piece titled Stuck in the Middle, a participatory performance in which people wear devices representing classical binaries such as male/female, fast/slow, poor/rich, and more.   This year I also spent endless hours experimenting with vibe coding, I created a new piece which I call My Coded Generated Selfie and this experimentation eventually led me to co-teach vibe coding class with Joe. This was a fun class (actually my favorite) and I keep feeling that this shift to generative code is truly revolutionary both for people intimidated by programming and for those who consider themselves experts.  Some artworks I started creating this year are still underdeveloped, and I hope to revisit them later on. These include Two Cents, a wearable trained on my voice that counts the words I generate and assigns them a price according to LLM pricing protocols. I also started a piece about my sister’s passing, using AI to offer explanations while I try to metabolize something that still resists explanation. Even with the models helping, this one is difficult to make, and even harder to imagine sharing. Beyond that, I spent time with Nano-Banana and made a series of “imaginable wearables.” I love how good these generative models have become. It’s a pleasure to watch them evolve and see how they change over time.  Alongside making, I kept writing, and writing, and writing. I’m making real progress on my book draft about Becoming a Humanaid. I also wrote and published a few papers. One of them was written with Adam Wright on in(A)n(I)mate and presented at SIGGRAPH 2025 in Vancouver. I wrote another paper about my experimentation with MOVE-ME, and I will be traveling to Singapore to present it at AAAI 2026, on a panel dedicated to the use of AI in live performances.  This year, as in most years, I spent a lot of time inside museums and galleries. Traveling for conferences gave me the chance to see work around the world by artists I deeply admire. I truly believe this kind of looking quietly nourishes my own making. I saw a Yoko Ono retrospective alongside a powerful Wafaa Bilal exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. I saw Rashid Johnson at the Guggenheim in New York. In Vienna, I spent time with exhibitions by Hito Steyerl and Damien Hirst, and with breathtaking collections of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. In Rome, I saw Wangechi Mutu. And closer to home, I caught a unique Matisse exhibition and a Ruth Asawa retrospective. I feel incredibly lucky to be able to see so much art by so many talented artists. Again and again, these encounters bring me back to the same lessons: attention is a kind of devotion. Loving as a practice.   Lastly, but absolutely not least, I spent a lot of time outside this year. Sky is wonderfully consistent about getting me out for two walks a day, and Ofer kept encouraging me out to the trails near home. We visited Yosemite twice: once, as we often do, to see the Firefall for my birthday, and a second time with family who came to visit. We also spent many days by the ocean, both close to home and farther away. There were so many whales this year. Sometimes we could see them right from the shore, and it felt miraculous.  Goodbye 2025. You gave me a wider heart than I knew I had. May 2026 bring us steadier ground, continued becoming, and more chances to practice art-making and love.
0 Comments
I’m writing from Vancouver, where I’m attending the SIGGRAPH 2025 conference. The days here are dense, with back-to-back sessions, immersive exhibitions, and countless hallway conversations that stretch long after the schedule ends. As I move through it all, I keep asking myself: What are the most urgent questions emerging from this moment? SIGGRAPH has always impressed me with its ability to bring scientists and artists into the same room. This year is no different. Some people I meet identify firmly with one side or the other, but I also notice many who seem to inhabit a hybrid space, moving fluidly between both worlds. This year, much like the few previous ones, there are many conversations about AI and I can't help noticing a tension in how we think about this technology. On one side, some are framing it as nothing more than a tool while others see it as a form of nonhuman intelligence.  Early in the week, keynote speaker Aaron Hertzmann made a strong case for the first view. He argued that AI is not a person and therefore cannot be creative. AI-generated art, he said, is ultimately human-made art, with AI serving as just another instrument in the process. Drawing comparisons to historical shifts like the rise of photography, he reassured artists they need not fear being replaced. The room seemed to exhale - “Thank goodness, we’re not going to be replaced…” But I couldn’t help wondering: why does the question of replacement echo so persistently through conversations about AI?  In the meantime at the SIGGRAPH art gallery, a juried exhibition curated by Francesca Franco on the theme of connecting nature, art, and technology, I encountered a distinctly different energy. That same creative spark ran through the rest of the Experience Hall, which included the Immersive Pavilion and the Emerging Technologies programs curated by Saskia Groenewegen and Nathan Matsuda, respectively. Along with the new and utterly exciting Spatial Storytelling program curated by Marco Cemusoni. In the art gallery I resonated with Plant.play(), a piece by Yoonji Lee, Chang Hee Lee, and Alo Asadipour, featuring a living plant playing a pet simulation game. Environmental sensors translate the plant’s biological signals into caregiving decisions, which shape the behavior and development of a virtual pet on a nearby screen. Viewed through the lens of “replacement,” the piece becomes provocative: a plant takes the place of a human gamer, and the simulated pet stands in for a living animal. Will humans one day be replaced by plants? Will organic pets be replaced by simulated pets? And are these questions anywhere near as alarming as the one that hovers over so many AI discussions. I guess not. We rarely really worry about plants or animals replacing us. Perhaps it is because we assume a position of superiority over them and their intelligence. With AI, though, we’re less certain, especially as evidence grows that it can outperform us in task after task.  To dismiss AI as “just a tool” may be one of our attempts to reaffirming superiority. Over dinner with SIGGRAPH pioneer Julian Gomez, he reminded me of a quote attributed to Albert Einstein: "If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid". Like many other nonhuman intelligences, we insist on judging their abilities according to human terms, comparing them to what we can do and eventually dismissing them for who they are. To be honest, I don’t think we spend enough time acknowledging that despite the fact that these intelligences might not be able to do things we humans do, their abilities are still curious and interesting, and may even be beyond our comprehension. When we insist on a narrow, human-centered lens, we often miss the opportunity to better understand their intelligences.  Moving in and out of the convention center, I kept noticing the nonhumans around me: bee colonies buzzing outside the windows, a cricket landing beside me at lunch, seagulls gliding over the Vancouver port, the lush living roof above the building. Inside, artworks echoed this presence: an animated flock of glass seagulls, a helium sea-mammal balloon flapping its fins in response to visitors’ hand gestures, a delicate mechanical mimosa plant that opened when approached. Reminding us that intelligence, responsiveness, and creativity take many forms.
 Other works invited attendees to reimagine their own bodies and explore other modes of being: mechanical finger extensions positioned as artificial parasites that moved and sensed the world in their own way while being attached to a human body. Another piece offered visitors to experience the presence of an artificial tail attached to their bodies. And our own piece, which I have presented with Adam Wright, invited people to consider having a conversation with inanimate objects, treating them as active, lively entities worthy of attention.   Still other works turned the lens back on human difference, offering immersive perspectives of a baby, a person with ADHD, or a busy, tired, and frustrated mother, reminding us that even human experience is far from uniform.
On the day before last, I was invited by Robert Twomey and Ash Eliza Smith to perform in their Quantum Theatre. They attached QR codes to my body, draped a string of glowy sensors around my neck, and placed a VR headset over my eyes. On stage with me was Scarlett, another performer I had never met, similarly equipped with prompts and sensors. The instructions we received were deliberately vague. Robert and Ash reminded us only to stay aware of our relationship with each other, the objects, the sounds, and the surrounding environment. When the performance began, I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I could still see through the headset, so I was aware of my environment, but at the same time seeing text which overlayed it. Some of this text wasn't legible. I lifted cubes covered in QR codes. Moving them seemed to trigger subtle changes, perhaps in the temperature around my neck, or perhaps in the sounds played aloud. I am not entirely sure what changed and how, in response to some of these changes, my movements shifted. After 15 or 20 minutes of exploration, the demo ended, and I still couldn’t say exactly what had happened exactly.  Later, over coffee with Ash, we talked about how refreshing it feels to embrace not-knowing and open-endedness, especially in a space where, just across the hall, corporate booths are busy presenting polished, finalized, “finished” products, assuming to know exactly what they do and how we might use them. As I leave SIGGRAPH, I carry a clearer sense of my role and responsibility as an artist today. I wish to continue and invite a rethinking of human dominance and superiority. Shifting more regorously into post-humanistic realms I wish to offer participants moments when they can see not only themselves, but also the multitude of intelligences and agencies that surround them. And with that, also invite them to embrace the truth that we may never fully understand it all, and that this, too, is okay. ~~~ Photos shown here include: Photo 1 - An image of me by the SIGGRAPH sign, taken by Adam Wright. Photo 2 - An image of keynote presentasion given by Aaron Hertzmann. Photo 3 - The artwork Plant.play(), a piece by Yoonji Lee, Chang Hee Lee, and Alo Asadipour. Photo 4 - A cricket that joined me for lunch at the Vancouver port. Photo 5 + 6 - the artwork Mimosa Pithics by Scottie Chih-Chieh Huang, Ming-Hong Wu, Hsiu-Mei Chang, and Chin Hsun Liu (left panel) and the artwork Unbound Horizons by Lino Tagliapietra (right panel) Photo 7 - Demo of Spread Your Wings by Mingyang Xu, Yulan Ju, Qing Zhang, Christopher Changmok Kim, Qingyuan Gao, Yun Suen Pai, Giulia Bardareschi, Matthias Hoppe, Kai Kunze, Kout Minamizawa Photo 8 - Demo of Parasitic Finger by Akira Nakayasu, Saki Sakaguchi, and Mina Shobasaki Photo 9 - Adam and I talking with a Pepsi Can at our Fast Forward presentation. Photo taken by Everardo Reyes. Photo 10 + 11 - Demo of Primordial Reality by Taisuke Murakami (left pannel) and Demo of Unbalanced by Yi Chun Ka, Yu Wen Huang, and Yu Ann Lai (right pannel). Both photos taken by the presenters of the work. Photo 12 - Quantum Theatre by Robert Twomey, Ash Eliza Smith. Photo taken by Adam Wright. Any day is a good day to start a blog. This one will focus on my experiences with art-making, art-viewing, and art-thinking. For a long time, I struggled to express myself in writing. English is not my first language, which made it even more challenging. However, with the advent of large language models (LLMs), every piece of text I write, whether it's a short email or a lengthy book chapter, now gets proofread by one LLM or another (including this post). My favorite prompt is “rewrite for clarity and coherence,” which I use to refine my text. To me, this process is like photo editing. When I was a professional photographer, no photo could be published without at least some editing.
My engagement with LLMs goes beyond writing. As you can see from my artworks, AI is my primary medium, and I explore it through performances, installations, and new media theory. I follow a practice-as-research (PAR) methodology, which is just another way of saying that I live with AI, something we all do these days. Through my art, I aim to understand its impact on my life, behavior, and social interactions. Beyond creating art, I also maintain a dedicated practice of art viewing. I regularly visit museums and galleries to see what other artists are making and what they are thinking about. Contemporary art is my favorite, though I also take time to appreciate modern and classic works. My art-making is constantly in dialogue with the work of others. I don’t work in a vacuum, and I find it difficult to claim that my work is entirely original because, honestly, I don’t believe anything can be called truly original. The art I encounter is an essential source of inspiration for me. Sometimes, the connection is obvious, and my work responds directly to something I've seen. Other times, the influence is less clear, but I know it’s there. Art-thinking includes engaging in conversations, reading books and articles, and spending time reflecting and formulating questions or answers in my mind. These activities also inspire my art in various ways. In fact, this blog will be part of my art thinking in itself. As I continue to explore, I hope to share insights, inspirations, and reflections that spark meaningful conversations and discussions. I invite you to join me in this ongoing dialogue with art, AI, and the world around us. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and reflections as we navigate this ever-changing landscape. |
AuthorAvital Meshi - New Media and Performance Artist, making art with AI. Currently a PhD Candidate at the Performance Studies Graduate Group at UC Davis. Archives
January 2026
Categories |
RSS Feed