AI ART and Meaning What role does an artist play when employing AI? Artist statement by JJFBbennett If we accept that AI can generate vast quantities of statistically “meaningful” content from data and algorithms, then meaningful art may lie not in the output itself, but in its selection and framing. AI functions as a kind of unconscious, producing raw material at scale. The artist’s role shifts from maker to curator: deciding what to extract from the data’s noise, what to present as art, the context in which it appears, and the conversation it enters. The artist as the muddler and meddler in the centre of it all. This shift has an art-historical precedent. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp’s *Fountain* made a decisive claim: the artist had not sculpted the urinal but selected it, titled it, and placed it in a gallery. Meaning arose from the gesture of choice rather than the act of making. Walter Benjamin, too, anticipated this logic in his reflections on montage and editing: meaning can e...
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Artist Statement Somewhere Adrift
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Poem
Modernism and Promised Prosperity
We were glorious when we were young. Having a new and influential way of looking at the world.
Free of the arguments from illusion, visionary dreams, and the solitary evil genius.
We concentrated on the inner-urban.
That was until we arrived And dismissed our problems without evidence. Through powerful leaders doing God’s work.
Artist Statement video
Somewhere Adrift
Since I can remember, Australia's values have been under threat. I am talking about the fear of losing the innate grace, that is, the subjective sense of the Australian way. The threat list is long and most are foreign. The reported attacks by mass media are external to Australia's W.A.S.P. heritage. They are the values for what our soldiers died for. The land down under, adrift in Asia.
We Australians have been under the threat of potential invasion since the frontier wars. The fear is a deep-rooted "settler country" psychosis. And it gets whipped up by political leaders and media conglomerates at call. We are constantly reminded of our vulnerability. Our lucky country can be taken from us. We are surrounded by hostile agents who want what we have.
We have normalized the threat into a systematic level of cultural fear. Our decision-makers think of little else when considering our forward determinations. Calling on these deep-set but ill-defined societal values, we blunder the past into the future.
But, where is the art that describes the deep-set cultural anxieties and fears? Where are the aesthetic representations of the Australian perpetual settler mindset? I am not talking about here or there. I’m talking about systemic equivalence. Or there and about. The disjunction between art and cultural identification is cloaked by a tremendous silence
Australian art is bound to the manifestations of genre, style, and fashion spawned by allied interests. In short - we followed the European canon. Our cultural museums are the gatekeepers of this bind, determined to maintain acceptable heritage. What is not noted as acceptable is not considered worthy. It exists but cannot be noted.
National Galleries institutes cultural identity, power, and knowledge through artifact collection. They have the authority and resources to claim credibility. They maintain our allegiance to a trusted hierarchical heritage of shared values. The best art is created by individual geniuses, making individual aesthetic expressions. Their art is sanctimoniously given rightness through acquisition. The artist sees the merit of selling their art to a cultural institution. That is, an institution supported by cultural experts. There is a tacit understanding of what can be significant art, between the artist and the cultural expert.
Art museums need significant art to prove their adequacy on the big international stage. To rightfully stand as one of the echoes in the chamber.
Rightness acquisition/commissions are the sacred guardians of contemporary art that demonstrate Australian values as more than a dungeon of peculiarities from down under and somewhere adrift in Asia.
Poem
The Genius Artist
From Roberts to Nolan. And all those discarded as minimal importance. The goalposts of greatness remain narrow. Centred on personality and gendered genius. The cult of the Australian artist. Locked into the finite game of selectivity.
Poem
A Celebration of Shared National Values
From the Man of Titanium
How great is America?
Our rule of law.
Our free trade.
Our mateship.
But what of the long histories?
The misuse of power by governments against political opponents.
The Highway and the Lost Soldier The midday sun around Adelaide River does something violent to the bitumen. At forty-five degrees, the Stuart Highway softens like melting fat; it turns into a black mirror, rippling with an unnatural, liquid glare that pools over every low rise. That is where it waits. He is always trudging south, away from life and deeper into the blistering furnace, his boots making no sound against the tar. The Highway and Lost Soldier Standing From two hundred yards out, he resembles a stranded traveler you’d pull over to save. He wears sun-bleached, disintegrating drill cotton that matches the bone-white dust of the termite country, his head angled down at an impossible, broken angle against the glare. No broad-brim hat. No swag. No water bottle. Just stiff, unnatural limbs jerking with every stride. “Driver... look at his face. We need to stop—why won't he turn around?” He is no lost tourist. Could he be the linesman from the Overland Telegraph days who tore ...
The Terminal Horizon Tourist Bus Discovering the Terminal Horizon The Long Highway Out here, the world ends not in silence, but in fire. The asphalt bleeds into cracked red earth, stretching toward a bruised horizon where the sky refuses to cool. Behind the glass, you drive chasing ghosts through a desert that forgot rain a lifetime ago. Beneath the Scorch Every road leads deeper into the furnace. Even below the surface, the rock fissures and weeps, hot steam rising through subterranean fractures where molten veins pulse in the dark, feeding an ancient, unforgiving heat. Broken Arteries What we built couldn’t hold. Rails twist into the dunes, swallowed by iron sand and wind. Bridges split down the seam, concrete splintered into raw bone, tangled rebar, and dying wires crackling into the smoke. The machines stopped; the wasteland stayed. The Last Horizon And when the road finally runs out, there is only the ash, the petrified stumps, and the quiet. You are a lone figure sitting in...
The Terminal Horizon Highway The Terminal Horizon Tourist Bus Would you catch the Terminal Horizon bus? Travel sketches by metamodernist artist JJFBbennett The Long Highway Out here, the world ends not in silence, but in fire. The asphalt bleeds into cracked red earth, stretching toward a bruised horizon where the sky refuses to cool. Behind the glass, you drive chasing ghosts through a desert that forgot rain a lifetime ago. Beneath the Scorch Every road leads deeper into the furnace. Even below the surface, the rock fissures and weeps, hot steam rising through subterranean fractures where molten veins pulse in the dark, feeding an ancient, unforgiving heat. Broken Arteries What we built couldn’t hold. Rails twist into the dunes, swallowed by iron sand and wind. Bridges split down the seam, concrete splintered into raw bone, tangled rebar, and dying wires crackling into the smoke. The machines stopped; the wasteland stayed. The Last Horizon And when the road finally runs out, the...
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