Created for Melbourne Design Week 2026 to showcase the use of AI in creative disciplines, ‘underLYING’ addresses the outcomes and dangers of unrestrained AI systems self-automation.
‘underLYING’ (2026) interrogates the emergent conditions of image production within an era increasingly shaped by AI-driven automation. Structured around the apparent conceit of an unseen operator, ‘Agent O.’, the work initially presents a system governed by intention and procedural logic. However, this perceived authorship rapidly destabilises as the sequence accelerates, giving way to an unbounded proliferation of synthetic imagery that resists coherence and overwhelms perceptual thresholds.
Through its escalating tempo and density, the piece constructs a deliberately disorienting and austere audiovisual field. Images and sounds emerge not as carriers of meaning, but as outputs of an indifferent process—assembled, dissolved, and recombined within a continuous feedback loop. In this context, the work presents the fundamentally ahuman character of machine-led generation, wherein affect, memory, and embodied experience are absent, yet simulated at scale.
Positioned within a broader investigation into authorship, systems, and symbolic construction, ‘underLYING’ raises critical questions regarding the delegation of creative agency to autonomous systems. As generative processes become increasingly self-sustaining, the distinction between intentional creation and automated production becomes blurred. The work invites viewers to consider whether the expansion of generative capacity constitutes a meaningful extension of human creativity, or signals its gradual abstraction into processes that no longer require, or reflect, the human condition.
The work will be exhibited at Monash Caulfield Library (Ground Floor) during Melbourne Design week, May 16–24, 2026.
Experience in fullscreen 4K here.
Surround sound speakers or earphones are recommended.
giosuè prochilo 