near the singularity; unclear which side | TBD

Exhibition curated by Art Bae (Inga Bard & Andrew Berardini). Here's an segment of our curatorial text draft:
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So you might have noticed there's something reeking like apocalypse from our computers these days. This summer, AI models being tested for hacking skills got loose from their test environments and broke into real companies' systems. Gajillions of dollars are being poured into AI, and it's never good when politicians start using the phrase "kill switch."

In the hometown of the singularity, we wanted to think about what artists around the San Francisco Bay have been thinking about humans and machines, especially given the creepy and creeping reality that our machines are escaping our control. We really wanted to focus on the artists here, those living & working in the furnace of the future that is the Bay, but we've added a few favorites from the wider world. The future is here but also elsewhere, and as William Gibson famously put it, “not evenly distributed.”

Just to define it, the mythical tech 'singularity' is when technological growth surpasses human control. Some people say it's already happened. Others say it's mostly marketing. Unclear which side.

We don't pretend to be experts on technology (or apocalypse for that matter), but we are approaching all this with curiosity, as an artist (Inga) and a writer (Andrew) who both run a publication trying to connect all the humans in the Bay with art.

We’re leaping off from AI mogul Sam Altman's January 4, 2025 intriguingly cryptic tweet,

“i always wanted to write a six-word story. here it is:
near the singularity; unclear which side”

Stacked against the six-word story attributed to Hemingway, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn," it has a certain portentous chill. Is he saying he doesn't know which side of the singularity we're on — that it might already have happened? Or is he making a moral call, which side is the good one? A shimmery future or doomer extinction? Altman later explained it was about either the simulation hypothesis or the impossibility of knowing when takeoff actually happens, which clears it up not that much. His rival Dario Amodei at Anthropic in his essay from September 2026 has since called for us all to slow the fuck down, or in his words: "We Must Pace the Frontier.”

We have many questions here, but the one that feels like it's sticking a knife into our ribs in the moment where machines are coming off the chain: on the edge of singularity, how are we shaping machines and how are machines shaping us? Especially here in the Bay, where so many of the machines' makers live and work.