Machine Love at Mori Art Museum

One of the year’s major digital institutional shows, Machine Love at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum framed the post-pandemic acceleration of AI and virtual life as both medium and subject. The show brought together roughly fifty contemporary works made with game engines, AI and VR, tracking new forms of image-making built from networked datasets, including projects that use generative AI. It was thus a survey on how artists work with datasets and real-time rendering to produce new kinds of images and environments, including avatar-based pieces addressing identity and hyperreal landscape simulations. The show wasn’t a blind celebration of AI though and did take an occasional critical stance. Many works paired immersive installation formats with themes that recur across the current AI debate, involving ethics, ecology, historical interpretation, and questions of life and death. Framed as a cross-section of machine-assisted and machine-collaborative practices, the show positioned these tools as both technical infrastructure and cultural subject matter.