Artist: Bennett Miller

There was a moment when the machine, like a child with no rules, no past, no fear, made something pure. Untethered from conscious intent, its mistakes were not mistakes—they were discoveries, raw and alive, a kind of poetry that cannot be taught.
—ChatGPT-4o

Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition in Paris of new prints by Bennett Miller, on view from January 15 through March 8, 2025, at 4 rue de Ponthieu.

An Academy Award–nominated director, Miller uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems to create imagery which he renders into pigment and gelatin silver prints. This practice emerged following his five-year immersion in a documentary filmmaking project that investigates how the forces of technological evolution are reshaping human experience. The film is yet to be released.

In 2021 Miller was invited by OpenAI to beta-test an early version of DALL•E. He discovered the AI model to be a new medium with unfathomed potential. The resultant body of work introduces avant-garde implications of AI through the lens of a previous revolutionary invention—photography. Despite its resemblance to photographs from the nineteenth century into the twentieth, this body of work is not photography. Rather, it is an extended expedition into a new realm of art, made using a tool with unprecedented characteristics. As Benjamín Labatut describes in Gagosian Quarterly, “The gravity of the past lends its weight to these images. It’s as if they’d been pulled out from darkness, conjured from the void with the aid of technology.”

The works are haunting, mysterious, and evocative. A girl is poised at the edge of a plank, suspended high over an abyss. A man in white trembles. Or dances? A woman lies beneath white blankets in a poetic study of stillness. Dreaming? Dead? The silhouette of a figure stands before a vast dead whale on the proscenium stage of a vacant theater. Each image is a world of contrasts—majestic, profane, grotesque, nostalgic—inviting contemplation and unease in equal measure.

The works in this and Miller’s previous two exhibitions with Gagosian were created using DALL•E 2, the first publicly released generative AI system. Miller produced and archived over a hundred thousand images from the period before the model was released and through the time it began to change. The paradoxical visions of these works emerged from cultivating the hallucinatory qualities of the model—elements that Miller embraced and shaped, rather than smoothed over. DALL•E 2 has since been rendered obsolete by newer versions and other generative AI systems.

The glitches and relative crudeness of DALL•E 2 are integral to the work, as Miller merges ethereal qualities of early photography with surreal outputs unique to this model as it existed at a finite point in time. Drawing from strategies reminiscent of modernist and Surrealist photographers, he employs cropping, blurring, and selective focus to destabilize visual expectations, creating images that defy resolution and explore ambiguity.

Miller’s project makes the familiar unfamiliar and undermines established context, yet we are not estranged from all this strangeness. Rather, the indeterminacies of these works imagine the potentials and uncertainties of AI as both technological development and artistic medium.