Rachel Maclean’s ‘DUCK’ brings Marilyn Monroe back to life with the help of AI. (Film stills courtesy of Off the Wall)
In March 2023, Pope Francis was famously spotted on the street in a white, Balenciaga-style puffer coat. Except, of course, he wasn’t.
The pope in the puffer coat was the entirely fictional AI creation of Pablo Xavier, a 31-year-old Chicago construction worker who fooled most observers. Suddenly, the media’s hand-wringing over how AI imagery might erode our shared sense of reality went from “what if” to “now what” as we all scrambled to understand our new visual environment.
Off the Wall @ 725 Ponce, a program of experimental film on the Beltline, will explore these and other reality-bending uses of technology in its upcoming program New Directions August 15 and August 16. Off the Wall is the periodic program of experimental film and video art projected onto five stories on the face of the Eastside Trail’s 725 Ponce building. The program launched in 2023 after a years-long Covid delay and is led by Emory film and media professor Gregory Zinman.
New Directions is an international group show featuring artists who work with quantum computing, LIDAR, cutting-edge animation, NFTs, deepfakes and, yes, AI in ways that question what reality is and how it’s ever possible to know for certain.
“I’m looking for things that are just on the horizon,” said Zinman in an interview regarding the technologies used by the show’s eight artists. Zinman touts the prestige of the artists involved, noting that many are represented by top galleries with exhibitions at major museums around the globe.
Glasgow-based installation and video artist Rachel Maclean, for example, has mounted notable solo exhibitions at Tate Britain and at the Venice Biennale. The artist is represented in New Directions by her 2024 video DUCK, a deepfake short film following Sean Connery’s James Bond undone by Marilyn Monroe raised from the dead. Maclean plays all roles but in styles unlike the original actors, raising the specter of the kind of AI-enabled immortality that Hollywood actors dread.
At 100 feet tall, the Off the Wall building facade is the largest movie “screen” in the Southeast. The program employs a system created by Atlanta artist Micah Stansell and is designed to bring unique cultural offerings to Atlanta. Most of the films Zinman screens are difficult or impossible to find elsewhere. “You either come to see it at the show or you don’t see it,” he said.
“In our streaming environment, in our digital environment,” Zinman continued, “where you can’t find what you want or you can’t decide, there’s something to be said for a curated program where you know you’re in good hands. Where you know you’re going to see something that you can’t see anywhere else.” New works by Peter Burr and Joel Silverman have been commissioned specifically to fit 725 Ponce’s almost-but-not-quite-square format.
Zinman is aware of the dicey politics that AI, quantum computing and other cutting-edge technologies wade into. New Directions is designed to highlight precisely such thorny questions.
“I do not have a lot of confidence in the very large corporations that are trying to develop artificial general intelligence,” said Zinman. “I think we’ve lost sight of ethics and guardrails. But what artists have always done with technology is get us to rethink its putative use — to break things open, rewire things, break the code. Artists may be able to provide an alternative to how this technology is used and should be used.”
Addie Wagenknecht’s Fighting Windmills (2024) also uses deepfake technology to present a boxing match in which the artist fights herself — a fitting metaphor for the life of an artist. Libby Heaney’s Q Is for Climate (?) (2023) features visuals and sounds that have been processed by the artist’s non-binary quantum computing code to contrast a quantum way of looking at the world against a linear way that is reliant on extraction and fossil fuels.
Atlanta-based Joel Silverman presents Ponce de Leon Time Portal (2025), which features animation and live action that wraps together the facts of the major Atlanta roadway’s history together with the various myths that have grown up around it. Citing the fraying of shared norms and shared reality in our society during a phone interview, Silverman said “Storytelling may be a better way of dealing with [this problem] than laws and courts right now.”
A recent Pew Research survey found that Americans lean decidedly negative on the prospects and uses of AI in most areas of daily life, and Zinman himself decries what has broadly come to be known as “AI slop.” Such fears stand on top of the already reality-shredding effects that social media has been accused of for over a decade.
Still, Zinman holds onto hope that other uses of all these technologies are possible, and that artists may show the way. “The work in this show in particular are some of the most thoughtful and creative and pleasurable alternatives that I’ve seen,” said Zinman.
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Cinqué Hicks is a Warhol grant-winning art critic and writer who has written for Public Art Review, Art in America, Artforum.com, Artvoices and other national and international publications. He has served as senior contributing editor of the International Review of African American Art and as interim editor-in-chief of Art Papers. He was the founding creative director of Atlanta Art Now and producer of its landmark volume, Noplaceness: Art in a Post-Urban Landscape.
