Soulless Machines, Entropic Dreams
As synthetic aesthetics saturate, artists reject perfection in favour of breakdown and distortion.
n the early days of AI art, smoothness was mistaken for progress. Generative systems offered boundless output, frictionless forms, and seductive spectacle. But as synthetic aesthetics multiply in fairs, campaigns, and curatorial platforms, artists are beginning to ask—what happens when beauty becomes hollow? What if the image knows everything except how to feel? From glitch-based installations to entropic video experiments, a new language is forming. These works do not reject technology, but they refuse its false transcendence. What emerges is not the new sublime, but the broken code beneath it.
In ENTRO_PY, French artist François Vogel explores what he calls “elasticity as an entropic trigger of expanded reality.” Exhibited through Fakewhale’s curatorial interface, Vogel’s work distorts time, compresses vision, and warps bodily coherence—not as novelty, but as resistance. “I wanted the distortion to become the sculpture,” he writes, rejecting machine-defined space in favour of embodied friction. Here, entropy is not failure but a lived tension against system control.
At the upcoming 2025 Frieze London tent, Sophia Al-Maria is set to transform the art fair into a site of rupture. Her planned makeshift comedy club, staged daily as part of the Artist Award commission, is described by the artist as both a seance and a safety valve. “Humour is a safety valve,” she writes, framing each unscripted performance as a ritual for exorcising institutional spectacle. Rather than confront the art fair with spectacle of her own, Al-Maria uses lightness, absurdity, and live presence to loosen the structure from within. The result is not a performance of disruption, but disruption itself.
Marcello Maloberti’s DIO A BATTERIA offers a quieter reckoning. Installed in the deconsecrated Church of San Carlo, a single neon word pulses dimly from a truck battery. The institutional exhibition text describes the piece as an exploration of fragility, faith, and impermanence. The light flickers, fades, and hesitates. Unlike AI’s promise of infinite replication, Maloberti’s work accepts its own limits. The sacred here is not declared, it is allowed to fail. Collapse becomes its own kind of sanctity.
Where AI once promised infinite possibility, its aesthetic outputs now feel closed and emotionally vacant. The new wave is not anti-technology, but anti-illusion. It rejects polish as a proxy for meaning, choosing instead to dwell in distortion, tension, and glitch. These artists remind us that not everything must function. Some things—vision, reverence, memory—are most alive when they falter. In a world of seamless systems, it may be the flicker, the crack, or the laugh that holds what we’ve lost.
