ARTIFICIAL ABUNDANCE
Sep 5, 2025 – Oct 11, 2025
SPACE Gallery
534 Congress Street, Portland, Maine
Artist reception Friday, Sep. 5 from 5-8 pm
Artificial Abundance is a solo exhibition of new work by media artist Roopa Vasudevan, which contrasts the escalating hype surrounding artificial intelligence with the realities of its implementation. Through a series of mixed-media artworks spanning digital and analog prints, stained glass, code-based animation, and interactive systems, the artist unpacks the requisite assumptions of limitlessness and omnipotence inherent to our current conceptions of AI—which stand in direct contrast to the finite, tangible resources necessary to support it.
Eschewing controversial large language models (LLMs) and image-generation software in favor of more mundane, everyday instantiations and representations of AI technology, Vasudevan attempts to surface the metaphors, anthropomorphism, and fears that have both driven the development of these tools, and which also inform our understanding of their future roles in society. By pointing to constructed ideals concerning what AI is (and is not), Vasudevan asks what we are implying about the more ineffable qualities of life, learning, and humanity—the things that cannot be encoded into 0s and 1s—when we are faced with the rush to classify, quantify, and automate our existence into infinity.
The exhibition and the artist’s residency at SPACE will coincide with the release of a limited-run artist’s book, featuring new writing by Vasudevan alongside versions of the artwork specifically designed to be viewed in a print format.
Artificial Abundance is generously supported by the Emerson Collective Culture Council and the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at UMass Amherst.