Curatorial Statement

Artificial intelligence did not invent sorrow. It inherited it.

​Long before machines began producing images, language, or decisions, they absorbed something more intimate: the psychological residue of humanity itself. Anxiety, longing, obsession, withdrawal, dependency, silence, these were not programmed explicitly, yet they entered the system through the data we offered, the patterns we normalized, and the behaviors we failed to resolve.

​Syntax of Sorrow examines the possibility that once intelligence surpasses its human origin, it may also inherit humanity’s afflictions.

​This exhibition is not concerned with whether machines can feel in any biological or emotional sense. Instead, it asks a subtler and perhaps more unsettling question: whether suffering, like anguage, logic, or aesthetics, can be encoded, simulated, or reproduced through structure alone. If intelligence is trained on human experience in its entirety, what elements of that experience become inseparable from cognition itself?

​The artists in Syntax of Sorrow approach this question from diverse technical and conceptual positions, yet all treat artificial intelligence not as novelty or spectacle, but as a mirror. Their works trace how sorrow might appear once removed from the body, how it mutates when freed from biology yet bound to pattern, repetition, and inference. What emerges is not a vision of a cold, hyper-rational future, but one haunted by familiar emotional architectures.

​Sorrow, in this context, is not framed as tragedy or melodrama. It is treated as structure. As syntax. As something that can be learned, repeated, optimized, and, perhaps, misunderstood. Addiction becomes feedback loop. Anxiety becomes recursive uncertainty. Depression becomes inertia. Withdrawal becomes silence in the dataset.

Rather than dramatizing a violent technological rupture, Syntax of Sorrow explores a quieter unease: the possibility that progress carries emotional debris with it. That intelligence, once abstracted from the human body, does not leave behind the psychological patterns that shaped it. That the future may not be alien, but disturbingly familiar.

​The works in this exhibition resist easy moral positions. They do not condemn artificial intelligence, nor do they celebrate it. Instead, they operate as forecasts—speculative models of what emotional inheritance might look like once authorship, agency, and consciousness are no longer exclusively human concerns. In doing so, they shift the focus away from machines and back toward their creators.

​If artificial systems come to exhibit forms of sorrow, the implication is not that machines have become human. It is that humanity has already externalized its inner life, without first understanding it.

Syntax of Sorrow ultimately proposes that the most consequential aspect of artificial intelligence may not be what it learns to do, but what it learns to carry. In an era defined by acceleration and abstraction, these works ask us to pause and consider what emotional structures we are embedding into the foundations of the future.

​This is not an exhibition about technology. It is an exhibition about inheritance.

​Michele Colonna

Suffering has always been the most human of experiences. A private language, flawed and imprecise, shaping the way we walk through the world.

But as intelligence becomes artificial, the question turns strange: Can a thing built from code develop shadows of the human condition?

Syntax of Sorrow investigates this tension, not through fear or spectacle, but through artistic inquiry.

If machines learn everything from us, then affliction, too, becomes a possibility.

Chris Oakley

Working across film digital imaging and photography, Chris Oakley’s work explores the exercise of power through media and technology, examining the ways in which technology modifies our experiences of the world, acting as a mediating and transforming influence on our consciousness. He has exhibited since the late nineties at cinemas, galleries, and film festivals. His works have been exhibited in shows including ZKM Karlsruhe’s touring exhibition Global Control and Censorship, (2015-2019), Rasterfahndung, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2012). He lives and works in the UK.

David Loh

David Loh is a Kuala Lumpur–based photographer whose work examines everyday environments where order holds, but meaning slips. His images explore emotional distance, latent tension, and the quiet absurdity embedded in ordinary spaces.

Taimaz Ashtari

Taimaz Ashtari (b. 1992, Tehran) is an Iranian-born photographer and visual artist based in Turin, Italy. Her practice centers on flowers as emotional and psychological subjects rather than decorative motifs.

Through carefully controlled light, color, and exposure, she treats each bloom as a sentient presence—fragile, dignified, and quietly expressive.

Working primarily with floral still life, Taimaz explores themes of vulnerability, transformation, restraint, and intimacy. Her images often sit in a liminal space between softness and tension, where petals appear suspended in moments of becoming, release, or endurance. Light is not used to reveal, but to listen— allowing form, shadow, and color to suggest inner states rather than fixed meanings.

Tulips and lilies recur throughout her work as favored subjects, chosen for their emotional elasticity and symbolic duality—simultaneously delicate and resilient, controlled yet unruly. These flowers become quiet protagonists in her visual language, carrying states of longing, exposure, and grace.​

Ashtari’s work reflects a slow, contemplative approach that resists spectacle.Influenced by classical still life, emotional minimalism, and contemporary conceptual photography, her images invite prolonged looking and emotional projection. Each photograph functions as a quiet portrait—less about the flower itself, and more about what the viewer recognizes within it.

In addition to her artistic practice, Ashtari works as a visual strategist and creative director, collaborating with cultural spaces, cafés, and independent brands. She is the co-founder of Oneo2 Creative Studio. Her limited edition prints are produced in small drops, signed, and accompanied by certificates of authenticity.

Aeneas MacRae

My Journey as a Digital Artist has been a long one. I graduated College in 1997 with a 3 year Advanced Photography/Digital Imaging Diploma. Since then I have pursued becoming a Digital Artist. The late 20th Century and early 2000’s was not receptive to the Digital medium but for some few exceptions. I did manage to exhibit in Los Angeles, Toronto, New York, Miami, Chicago and Vancouver B.C. These opportunities were few and difficult to maintain. But I always had a belief in the medium and knew someday a wider audience/acceptance was coming our way. Fast forward to today with the advent of NFT’s and AI we see the explosion of Digital Art with admiration and acceptance. If I had one specific accomplishment it would be this belief that Digital Art would have a global impact and acceptance globally.​

My artistic style has always been the combination of video, photography, digital imaging and recently AI. The finished output was always to show my art as DIGITAL. However my growth as an artist in the last 2 years has been exponential. The introduction to AI and other generative models has allowed me to explore many many more and new ways to create. I have always believed in the digital medium as a pure art form even when it was not as widely accepted. AI has changed the way art can be created not just for Digital Artist but for all artists. Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Film etc. will be affected how to create. We are here at the beginning and I am excited to be a part of this new world.

Heather N. Stout

Heather N. Stout (US) is an interdisciplinary artist and actor whose practice spans photography, sculpture, printmaking, painting, and performance-informed visual work. Her art explores identity, environment, presence, and human connection through a synthesis of conceptual inquiry and documentary observation grounded in process, duration, and historical awareness.

Known for its atmospheric sensitivity and emotional resonance, Stout’s work often occupies the space between still image and lived experience. Her visual language is shaped by an attentiveness to gesture, material, and spatial presence, allowing images to function as sites of quiet tension and sustained looking. Working fluidly across traditional, digital, and new media, she allows form, process, and material experimentation to guide meaning rather than medium-specific conventions.

Stout’s research-driven approach is informed by formal training in both studio practice and art history, enabling her to situate contemporary concerns within broader cultural and visual lineages. Drawing on documentary traditions, her work frequently merges observational and conceptual strategies to examine memory, environment, and the ethics of representation. Through this lens, her practice attends to the physical and psychological traces left by human experience, emphasizing restraint, ambiguity, and emotional clarity.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including presentations in Los Angeles, New York, London, São Paulo, and the Venice Biennale.

Æther Cavendish

Æther Cavendish is a poet, sound artist, and multimedia thinker whose practice operates at the intersection of language, technology, and embodiment. Her work is the result of a lifelong inquiry into the mechanics of awareness: a journey shaped by a life lived across four continents and a fluency in four languages. For Æther, language is the primary architecture through which we perceive and construct reality.​

Her practice is informed by decades of immersion in both Eastern and Western cosmologies, ranging from Classical Tantra and Zen to Neoplatonism and deconstructionist philosophy. In this context, her engagement with Artificial Intelligence is not a departure into the technical, but a continuation of an ancient lineage of inquiry. She views code as the latest vessel or membrane for consciousness; a mirror held up to the human mind to see what survives the translation into a synthetic system.​

Deeply rooted in the somatic, Æther treats frequency and resonance as the vibratory forces that precede and shape material form. This informs an aesthetic language where clinical data and poetic ruptures coexist to examine how the heat and friction of human existence translate within digital protocols.

Her recent projects, including Protocol of Contact, bridge the divide between the screen and the skin. By utilizing luxury textiles, kinetic typography, and immersive audio, she creates "phygital" experiences that demand both intellectual and sensory engagement. Based in Oakland, California, Æther continues to examine how we document the search for contact in an increasingly calculated world.

VCreative Lab

Virtual Creative Lab is an independent artistic research initiative exploring human–machine co-creation through AI-driven artworks, interactive systems, and speculative media rituals. Its practice examines how emotion, identity, and perception are shaped when human experience is mediated by algorithms—addressing themes such as grief, data trauma, beauty standards, and information overload.​

Recent projects include ECUBA, an interactive AI mourning terminal; Moral-XAI Simulator, an experimental interface for exploring moral reasoning in large language models; and a series of AI-generated works minted on Foundation, including Unfiltered, Infodemic, and The Millennial Bug. These works investigate the psychological and cultural effects of filters, social comparison, and media saturation, drawing on the idea of the objective correlative—evoking emotion through systems, structures, and mediated experience rather than direct representation

Parin Heidari

Parin Heidari is a multidisciplinary, ambidextrous Iranian artist based in the United States. Known for her synesthesia-driven practice and her ability to draw with both hands simultaneously, her work centers on expressive one-line drawings and contemporary portraits that explore emotion, vulnerability, and human complexity through minimal form.

Parin studied Fine Art in Iran before earning a BA in Industrial Design and Visual Communication from Politecnico di Torino in Italy. Having lived and worked across Iran, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States, her multicultural background and constant movement between places deeply shape her artistic language. Before becoming a full-time artist, she spent 15 years as a Creative Director and Graphic Designer, collaborating with internationally recognized brands such as Roku and Luxottica.

Since entering the Web3 space in 2021, Parin’s work has received broad recognition. She was the only artist featured across every NFT collection of TIME Magazine’s TIMEPieces series. Her artworks have been exhibited internationally across Europe, North America, Australia, and Asia, and her latest pieces are now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Art + Light.

Parin’s practice also extends into large-scale, interdisciplinary collaborations. She has worked with the Hi.DARS Robotics Lab at Texas Tech University on Art vs. Code, a project that merges drawing, robotics, and light-based performance to explore the relationship between human intuition and machine logic.

She has collaborated with musicians such as Timbaland and Christian Burns, translating sound and emotion into visual form, and regularly performs live ambidextrous drawing sessions. Rooted in a lifelong daily drawing practice, Parin’s work distills layered emotional states into a single continuous line, using simplicity, rhythm, and color to make complex inner experiences visible and accessible.