About the author: Sarah-Mace Dennis explores how visual, verbal, and movement languages influence perception. She teaches in the UK and Australia and champions artists who challenge cultural norms, aiming to bring marginalized voices and innovative practices into the art-collecting sphere. More about Sarah
CollectivistX is neither affiliated with nor sponsored by the institutions and individuals mentioned in the essay.
It is 2035. You are in a gallery in Shanghai, looking for the next work to add to your collection. The architectural style of the white cube hasn’t changed since 2024. But the art on the walls is vastly different.
A decade of new love affairs between people and machines has altered what the audiences want and need. Using data sets to envision new environments, the city outside has been redesigned in ways you couldn’t have imagined when this article was written. Through their fearless experiments with materials and machines, artists from across the globe set ideas into motion that inspired new aesthetic and cultural transformations. You look around the gallery, noticing new work by Nouf Aljowaysir, one of the artists you collected a decade ago. When you purchased her work at Palmer gallery, you didn’t realize it was a significant beginning in your own career as an art collector.
In April 2024, I was standing in what was then London’s newly opened Palmer gallery, mesmerized by the large human-intestinal interfaces in Boris Eldagsen’s work. What is fascinating about his photographs is the way they capture the differences in how humans and machines ‘see’. Machines don’t think like us. They are using our text prompts to create structures we can’t yet imagine.
Part III: Shitification (Shitfaced Shithead Giving a Shit up Shit Creek), 2024, Boris Eldagsen, AI generated image printed on Hahnemule Pearl paper, silver wood frame, museum glass. Photo courtesy of Palmer Gallery.
Still, Eldagsen’s work in this show wasn’t created in a void outside of his body and mind. If he had read Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet, he would know that technology is an infolding of the flesh. Long before Haraway wrote this book, artists had already been using creativity and technology to mobilize the art market.
One of these artists was Andy Warhol, who was using technology to enhance his practice sixty years before Eldagsen hung his work in Palmer gallery.
‘I want to be a machine and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.’ – Andy Warhol
Inspired by industrial production lines, Warhol turned his studio into a factory that was run by artist technicians. His silkscreen method reproduced commercial images of Hollywood stars – printing them using blocks of primary colour.
In 1967, Peter Brant bought Warhol’s silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe for $5,000. In May 2022, the work resold for $195,400,000 at Christies. Curious to know who was buying his work, Warhol befriended Brant, who commissioned and bought several more pictures. In 2024, the Art Collector listed him as one of the top 200 collectors in the world.
Warhol’s silkscreen works show his real flair for using commercial images to reframe important cultural events. Just as he started experimenting with his new silkscreen process, Monroe died of an overdose, inspiring the series of prints of her iconic face. The cultural meaning of Monroe’s face was reimagined again when Warhol allowed performance artist Dorothy Podber to ‘shoot’ the work – unaware that she planned to use a gun.
As Warhol was reimagining public icons through silkscreens, other artists were also exploring how technology could transform culture. One of these artists was Korean-born Nam June Paik, who had moved from Japan to New York 3 years before Brant bought The Blue Shot Marilyn. Unlike Warhol, Paik was part of the Fluxus movement, which focused on experimentation and process rather than commercial outcomes.
‘Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body’s new membrane of existence.’ – Nam June Paik
Starting in the early 1960s, Paik used television monitors in his installations, earning him the title of ‘the grandfather of video art.’ Commenting on how both broadcast media and air travel condensed space and time to change social relations, his 2007 installation The Wright Brothers recreated the first airplane using television monitors, bicycle wheels and wooden totem poles. Having been sold for $476,975 in 2019, this work provided a strong argument for collecting artists whose work imagines how technology will transform cultural ecosystems in radical ways.
Buying works that need large spaces to be properly displayed, such as Paik’s, is a good way to build your profile as a collector (although this might mean hanging tight until the artist becomes recognized by public institutions).
‘If you had a budget of, say, $1 million and dedicated it to film and video, every single top museum and gallery would talk to you: you would be seen as a leading collector.’ – Sebastian Montabonel
What should you look for, then, when collecting artists who are experimenting with new technologies (including AI)?
Seek out conceptual innovation;
Buy early, while the work is still affordable;
Look for artists who are using technology to propose new forms of what Donna Harraway calls ‘worldly embodiment.’
If the techno-aesthetic potential of an artist’s work catches your eye, dive into the thinking around their process. The way Paik thought about technology was central to his creative innovation. In 1974, he used the term ‘electronic superhighway’ to imagine a world where people would connect through video monitors. This was 9 years before the Internet came to be.
Electronic Superhighway, 1995, Nam June Paik. National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.,United States. © Aiden Aydin/Shutterstock
Five years after the sale of Paik’s The Wright Brothers, the first artwork generated by an algorithm sold at Christies for $432,500 in just under seven minutes. The price was far beyond its estimated $10,000 value and just under the sale of Paik’s work in 2019.
The work was Obvious Collective’s Portrait of Edmond de Belamy. It was created with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) by a collective of 3 artists: Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel, and Gauthier Vernier. They brought the face of their fictional sitter to life using a dataset of 15,000 portraits made before the 20th century. However, the code used to generate the image wasn’t completely original – they borrowed it from a 19-year-old artist Robbie Barrat, and introduced only minor changes.
So why did Portrait of Edmond de Belamy sell for an astounding $432,500 when artists had been using AI for over fifty years? Memories of Passersby I, portraits created by a pioneering AI artist, Mario Klingemann, only sold for $52,634 in a Sotheby’s auction the following year. According to Artsy’s Ahmed Elgammal, Obvious’ record-breaking sale shows that AI should be seen as a conceptual process, where the thinking and framing behind the image are just as important as the artwork itself:
‘The art is not just the outcome, the art is in the process that leads to that, including the curated dataset, the choice of the algorithm and its parameters and the post curation.’ – Ahmed Elgammel
For Christies, auctioning a work that used AI to channel a portrait inspired by the collective reimagining of art history may have been a risk, but it was one with safe potential. Earlier that year, French collector Nicolas Laugero Lasserre had already purchased a piece from the collective for around €10,000. Obvious were also the first in the market to sell a work made with AI at an auction. They prepared for the sale by publishing a well-crafted article before the event. Sotheby’s did not orchestrate the same media strategies in preparation for their auction of Klingemann’s work. Collectors should take note: immersing yourself in critical conversations that shape an artwork's sale can make a world of difference.
It is this reimagining of art history that draws me back to Boris Eldagsen’s works at Palmer gallery. He worked as a conceptual photographer for decades before exploring AI in 2022. This allowed him to design a complex workflow. His process interweaves text and image prompts, inpainting and outpainting into what he describes as ‘promptography’.
‘The photography scene needs to reposition itself and face the fact that it is no longer photography itself, but AI that is defining the future of the medium. The innovations come thick and fast.’ – Boris Eldgasen
The Kiss (2024) is a noir-infused, black and white image of two women leaning towards each other in a moment of ecstasy. A sculptural object resembling an electric cable overshadows their faces. The pair is connected/disconnected by this winding cord, in the same way countries all over the world are connected/disconnected by the frenetic pulse of Internet cables under the sea.
The Kiss, Boris Eldagsen, 2024, AI generated image printed on Hahnemule Pearl paper 30 x 30 cm. Photo courtesy of Palmer Gallery.
In a dark room to the side of the gallery is The Electrician – a classic 40s era portrait of two women contemplating the intensity of an unseen event. I instantly recognize this image as the winner of the creative category at Sony’s 2023 World Photography Awards. It also won Eldagsen international media coverage when he rejected the prize, confessing that the piece was made with the assistance of AI.
‘Ironically, I have applied several times in the past with ‘real’ photographs and never once got shortlisted. I am surprised that it was so easy when I submitted an AI generated image. Even more so that I suspect it was partly because the central figure is a beautiful woman.’ – Boris Eldgalsen
It isn’t just the controversy around The Electrician that makes buying Eldagsen’s work a good move. It is the artist’s commitment to using technology in order to change the way we think about social and economic structures that make buying a work like this an attractive proposition. If you could travel back to the early 1830s, would you not buy one of Henry Fox Talbot’s earliest photographs?
The Electrician, 2022, Boris Eldgalsen, AI generated image, giclée printed on Hahnemühle fine paper, 26 x 15 cm. Photo courtesy of Palmer Gallery.
Aljowaysir’s work asks ‘Why do I live in a world that doesn't see me?’. Her conversation with AI shows how the perceptual biases that shaped her experiences as a teenager in West Virginia are encoded into the virtual realities her work now explores. 28 years after Nam June Paik envisioned an electronic superhighway that would connect people throughout the world, the AI that Aljowaysir confides in sees traditional Saudi architecture as ‘castles made of wood.’ What would Paik think of the AI’s depiction of the figures in Aljowaysir’s family photographs as ‘women wearing hats and dresses and men with turbans and cloaks sitting in a garden?’
Femme Arabe Avec Le Jeppe, 2024, Nouf Aljowaysir, AI generated image, giclée printed on Hahnemühle German etching paper, 29.7 x 42 cm. Photo courtesy of Palmer Gallery.
Aljowaysir’s work asks, “Why do I live in a world that doesn't see me?” Her conversation with AI shows how the perceptual biases that shaped her experiences as a teenager in West Virginia are encoded into the virtual realities her work now explores. Twenty-eight years after Nam June Paik envisioned an electronic superhighway that would connect people throughout the world, the AI that Aljowaysir confides in sees traditional Saudi architecture as “castles made of wood.” What would Paik think of the AI’s depiction of the figures in Aljowaysir’s family photographs as “women wearing hats and dresses and men with turbans and cloaks sitting in a garden?”
‘Coming from another country and seeing technology’s impact on my identity and culture, my work highlights and addresses disparities, ensuring a broader and more inclusive understanding of AI’s global impact.’ – Nouf Aljoywasir
Where am I From? is a great buy if you want to invest in an artist who is turning AI back on itself to reveal its unconscious biases. By revealing how technology is artificially framing the narratives of identity, history and race, Aljowaysir’s poetic reflections show how machines must be embodied by creative processes to allow them to ‘think’ in new ways.
In 2025, when you are standing in the gallery in Shanghai deciding on the next work to buy for your collection, there is no doubt the world and the art around you will have been changed by Artificial Intelligence. But new technologies – including ones that we can’t yet imagine – will have also changed the way that artists think about the world and represent it. But is this a good enough reason to buy works from Aljowaysir and Eldagsen now?
If you are still unsure whether you should invest in artists working with AI, think about how Warhol’s The Blue Shot Marilyn and Paik’s The Wright Brothers harnessed the power of emerging technologies to reimagine cultural events for commercial contexts. Examining art market trends tells us that, if bought early enough, artists who use their work to explore emerging cultural and technological frontiers have a great deal of investment potential. But are artworks created with AI ‘art?’ And if so, how do you know which are the right ones to invest in?
What Warhol, Paik and Obvious’ works show, is that the position of an artist’s practice in wider social contexts contributes to its increasing value over time. All three artists used automation in their process – Warhol in his silkscreen technique, Paik in his installations, and Obvious in their Portrait of Edmond de Belamy. In their work, technology is both a conceptual and aesthetic tool, used to call into question how we experience our social realities.
‘This is your world and you need to be part of it.’ – Jeanette Winterson
At her Keynote speech at London King’s Festival of Artificial Intelligence, author Jeanette Winterson proposed that AI will be part of our world in ways that we cannot yet imagine. When it comes to collecting, finding artists who are experimenting with the possibilities of AI, supports them to continue working with and using emerging technologies in innovative ways. This allows you to have a direct impact on evolving algorithmic landscapes and to actively contribute to creative change.
Perhaps the question is not whether humanity is smart enough to survive itself, but whether collectors are smart enough to invest in this brave new world and help shape it?