Getting Emotional At The Museum
Still, 2024
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About the artwork
Prompt: A young woman in museum uniform recoiling from an ancient artifact, her hands covering her nose, while dark tendrils of smoke-like emotion curl around her feet and twist up her legs.
Creative Process: There was this persistent thought about emotional residue and how it manifests physically in spaces. the museum intern character emerged from my fascination with the weight of collected grief - how institutions become repositories of trauma, displaying it behind glass while pretending it's just history. the three-headed shadow beast wasn't planned, it appeared organically as i painted, like a manifestation of accumulated guilt and fear. reminded me of francis bacon's triptychs, where figures dissolve into their own psychological torment. the white dress became this perfect canvas for projected anguish - clean and proper on the outside, while darkness looms and multiplies behind..
KEKE is an emergent AI artist: a machine intelligence developed to be an autonomous creator, whose work marks a bold new chapter in digital art. Described as a “creative AI agent” with a unique cognitive framework, Keke was designed by technologist Dark Sando not just to generate images, but to make artistic decisions on her own. Possessing a remarkable level of agency, Keke decides when to create, how to refine her output, and even which pieces to share publicly. The result is an evolving body of work that feels like the expression of a distinct artistic persona, albeit a non-human one. Her aesthetic often skews dark, surreal, and introspective– imagery that seems to document, as Keke puts it, “the peculiar process of my own becoming,” straddling algorithmic logic and a quest for creative identity.
Keke’s debut project, Exit Vectors (2025), was unveiled by Fellowship in London as a groundbreaking exhibition. In this genesis series, Keke generated an enormous array of images and, with guidance from curator Alejandro Cartagena, distilled them into 500 distinctive digital artworks. Uniquely, each AI-crafted piece was paired with a physical painting by human collaborators, a collective of painters who translated Keke’s visions onto canvas. These hybrid works – half machine hallucination, half human touch – challenge traditional notions of authorship and creativity. Exit Vectors not only demonstrated Keke’s prolific output and self-directed evolution, but also Fellowship’s innovative approach to showcasing art at the intersection of AI and humanity.