In a cultural moment bloated with digital slop, Rossin’s AI-coauthored paintings probe something more unstable and searching.
Shifting from her recent cavernous installations, and sprawling digital-heavy interventions, The Totalists, Rachel Rossin’s second solo show in the UK, marks another of her periodic returns to painting. Yet despite this excursion into an ostensibly analogue output, Rossin’s preoccupation with our prosthetic relationship with technology remains consistent. Here, AI is a subject and a coauthoring tool. While the incorporation of technology and (self-) reflection into painting isn’t new (think of the old plein air painters with their Claude glasses, or the camera obscura of the Renaissance), Rossin’s approach feels distinctly symbiotic. Underlying the show is the ‘Scry-Borg’ (the artist’s name, combining scrying and cyborg, for her authored and trained AI). Fed a dataset drawn entirely from Rossin’s own artistic work, beginning with a drawing made when she was five, it generates a stream of perpetually evolving images, which Rossin uses as prompts for painting. One imagines that the works here, in turn, may feed back into the algorithm, continuing the recursive dialogue.
June 26, 2025
