Current Project: Hallucinating California

Hallucinating California is an (online) art show in which a group of California artists have come together to create work that is in conversation with California as a real and/or mythical place. The artists will each create their own bespoke AI* model for the show, and then share their model with the group. Then, all the artists will engage with the other artists’ models and make work that, because of this process, is intrinsically collaborative and in conversation with everyone involved in the show.

By the start of the show on November 1st, 2025, the artists will have all created works that use multiple of these unique models to convey myths and realities somehow related to the Golden State — meanwhile utilizing and/or critiquing the machine learning tools used in the creation of the works.

The artists are currently in the beginning stages of preparing for this show: In the current phase, some artists are going out and taking photos of their city, some are engaging with family photo albums, some are curating datasets from local archives, and some are documenting their own art style for remixing later.

Some artists have worked with generative AI before, and some have not. Those who have not made their own models are learning from the curator and from the other artists involved.

This show emphasizes that the manual curation of data and the subsequent creation of unique models is an increasingly creative tool, and is an important task for understanding our world which is increasingly dominated by technocapitalism and its thirsty march of extraction, homogenization, and war.

Hallucinating California hopes to tell one story of how people can come together by using AI, a tool that is most likely going to alienate and isolate people. While the artworks are not yet completed, the process for the work explores the new ways of collaborating and making that will only be more relevant as the 21st century progresses and AI becomes ever more pervasive.

Hallucinating California is curated by Edek Sher and is part of the 7th edition of the Wrong Biennale. Although no space is booked, this show will devirtualize in an IRL space sometime between November 1, 2025 and March 31, 2026. If you have a space in California that is interested in hosting this show, please reach out.

*The models created in this show will strive to be trained on media that was gathered consensually.