A Complete Waste of Energy and Time

A Complete Waste of Energy and Time takes its title from a familiar insult—leveled at art and at research without a tidy, measurable end goal—and turns it into a proposition. In a cultural moment shaped by tech’s demand for one-to-one utility, the exhibition argues for experimentation without certainty: a space where value emerges through wandering, testing, and translating rather than optimizing. Threaded through the show is an ongoing dialogue with Lessing’s Laocoön that asks what different mediums can and cannot carry—how an event, an image, or a story shifts, frays, and re-forms as it moves between sculpture, writing, computation, and material form.

Across two rooms, works stage translation as both loss and invention. A sixty-foot tapestry woven on a digital Jacquard loom assembles a narrative from AI and digitally sourced imagery, then drives it through successive physical abstractions, exposing the resource extraction, power generation, and hardware infrastructures that sustain the “virtual.” Its format echoes historical narrative tapestries and mirrors a film strip, while the loom’s proto-computational lineage returns automation’s older anxieties to the present, where AI once again unsettles creative labor. Nearby, wax and cast-metal sculptures pulled from photogrammetric archives of canonical statuary retain supports from the 3D printing process, embrace occlusions, and foreground process artifacts, insisting that reproduction never grants pure access to an “original,” but instead generates new objects that speak in their own medium. Photographic constellations trace influence as visible collage—rehearsing the recombinatory logic of machine generation—while animations of 4D forms, captured as long-exposure images, compress time into image and show how photography repeatedly rewires what space, time, and perception can become.