BENNETT MILLER
Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition in Paris of new prints by Bennett Miller.
January 15 - February 22, 2025
An Academy Award–nominated director, Miller uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems to create imagery which he renders into pigment and gelatin silver prints. This practice emerged following his five-year immersion in a documentary filmmaking project that investigates how the forces of technological evolution are reshaping human experience. The film is yet to be released.
The works are haunting, mysterious, and evocative. A girl is poised at the edge of a plank, suspended high over an abyss. A man in white trembles. Or dances? A woman lies beneath white blankets in a poetic study of stillness. Dreaming? Dead? The silhouette of a figure stands before a vast dead whale on the proscenium stage of a vacant theater. Each image is a world of contrasts—majestic, profane, grotesque, nostalgic—inviting contemplation and unease in equal measure.
The works in this and Miller’s previous two exhibitions with Gagosian were created using DALL•E 2, the first publicly released generative AI system. Miller produced and archived over a hundred thousand images from the period before the model was released and through the time it began to change. The paradoxical visions of these works emerged from cultivating the hallucinatory qualities of the model—elements that Miller embraced and shaped, rather than smoothed over. DALL•E 2 has since been rendered obsolete by newer versions and other generative AI systems.
Miller’s project makes the familiar unfamiliar and undermines established context, yet we are not estranged from all this strangeness. Rather, the indeterminacies of these works imagine the potentials and uncertainties of AI as both technological development and artistic medium.