“Synthetic Realities: Authenticity in the Age of AI Imagery.” Synthetic Realities, Exhibition Catalogue, Galerie Met (Berlin: 2025).
Presented by Galerie Met in Berlin on May 24 – June 7, 2025 in collaboration with Prompt Forum and Verse.
Artists
Chen Zirui, Anna Condo, Uglyy Fruuit, icysaw, Jess Mac, Maciej Miliszkiewicz, Niklas Poweleit, Isabelita Virtual, Mind Wank, Lilan Yang
Synthetic Realities: Authenticity in the Age of AI Imagery
The authentic self is the you that can be found at your absolute core. It is the part of you that is not defined by your job, or your function, or your role. It is the composite of all your unique gifts, skills, abilities, interests, talents, insights, and wisdom. It is all your strengths and vaues that are uniquely yours and need expression, versus what you have been programmed to believe that you are “supposed to be and do.” It is the you that flourished, unselfconsciously, in those times in your life when you felt happiest and most fulfilled.
Dr. Phil, Self Matters: Creating Your Life from the Inside Out
The rise of AI-generated imagery forces us to reconsider what authenticity means in a world where the synthetic and the real seamlessly blend. Traditionally tied to an artist’s presence, the verifiability of a captured moment, or originality, authenticity now faces new questions: Who—or what—is the author of an AI-generated image? Does authenticity lie in intent, process, or result? If an AI-generated image moves us, provokes thought, or unveils hidden structures within our world, does it not achieve a kind of truth?
These questions, though dressed in a progressive concern, misfire at their core. The appeal to “authenticity” is not a genuine engagement with art or subjectivity—it’s a symptom of a cultural regression. The artist has never owed anyone their “authentic self,” because that self is a fiction: a managed construct, a sustained performance. The recent obsession with being “real”—in art, in life, in algorithmic output—is less a pursuit of truth than a symptom of control. This is the soft tyranny of the authentic, a truth that is not actually explored but continually under surveillance and judgement, an ideal that doesn’t exist.
The cult of authenticity is a form of moral hygiene. It punishes contradiction, demands transparency, and disguises itself as empowerment. But what if “you do you, girl” and no one likes you? What if you discover at your absolute core isn’t “all your unique gifts, skills, abilities, interests, talents, insights, and wisdom” but a rotting black mould that is boring, cruel, incoherent, and untalented? The demand for authenticity isn’t actually about truth, it is about discovering the safest and most sterile version of yourself.
The so-called “authentic self” is not a source—it’s a symptom of a society that is desperate for anchors in a sea of instability. But it’s precisely in instability—those liminal, unformed zones—that subjectivity emerges as something dynamic, speculative, and even dangerous. To insist on a “true self” is to enforce a self-containment. It is to foreclose becoming in favour of coherence. It is the logic of the border, not the threshold.
Nowhere does this become more absurd than in the conversation around artificial intelligence. To demand that AI—or artists using AI—be “authentic” is to demand that something that is not fully formed, define its own conditions and boundaries of being. Yet, we must also consider the artists whose work is being ingested and fragmented by algorithms: are they—these creators whose labor is scraped, extracted, and commodified—regarded as “authentic”? Are we to believe that a photo of dog shit is more “authentic” than an illustration or painting by an underpaid artist simply because one is labeled with more certainty and more likely to be statistically represented in future iterations?
What is this hierarchy of value that assumes some kinds of labor, some images, some identities are inherently more “real” or more deserving of protection? Artistic labor has never been cleanly categorized, and yet the rise of generative models has forced a reckoning—one that too often results in reactionary claims about authenticity, purity, and theft, rather than deeper interrogations of how culture is made, who gets credited, and who gets erased.
What does purity mean under late-stage capitalism, when every gesture of “authenticity” is already embedded in circuits of commodification, spectacle, and algorithmic governance? If anything, AI is more “authentic” than humans. It never believed in the myth in the first place. It makes no claims to inner life. It simply reads the room. Yet, a machine doesn’t feel happiness or fulfillment. They only mimic understanding and emotions. They are simply our tools and, like artists, are likely to used and abused by the state and capital.
AI is not a stable collaborator—it is a mirror. It doesn’t create from truth; it creates from noise, from detritus, from the infinite leftovers of a digital age. What kind of “authentic relationship” can exist between artist and machine when neither really fully understand each other and one is just a reflection of the other? The love affair can only be volatile, one that can just as easily end in a loving relationship or in mutual destruction. But this is the ugly truth of art making, this is the place it thrives. The artist should never feel fulfilled. They should be trying on new personalities daily.
Art has never been a contract with essence—it is gambling with instability, placing bets with the unknown, a flirtation with dissolution. Those who cry betrayal at the rise of AI-generated art reveal more about their nostalgia than their ethics. They want art to remain human because they believe being human actually means something. It’s not that the centre doesn’t hold anymore—it was never there. The pure, undiluted absolute core is a myth.
So when we speak of authenticity in the age of AI, what are we really asking for? Not truth, but control. Not expression, but obedience. The authentic is not a destination—it’s a demand dressed in virtue. A velvet cage. And the artists who reject it are not abandoning sincerity—they’re refusing to be policed by the past.
We like to say “nature is authentic,” as if that grants it some kind of moral authority. But what we call “nature” is actually “chaos.” It’s violence without reason, fucking without passion, process without narrative. To romanticize it is to seek comfort in a fiction—one that conveniently erases our complicity in its destruction. So when we demand “authenticity,” we’re not asking for truth. We’re begging for a return to a fantasy of pre-technological innocence. The desire to be authentic is the desire to return to nature.
But AI shatters this illusion, and perhaps this is why there has been a backlash against it. It is not only a betrayal of the natural—it’s an exposure of how unnatural our ideas about nature really are. This is why AI disturbs: it strips away the myth that creativity is sacred. That the human is central. AI doesn’t pretend to be human—it mimics us with a precision that reveals how much of what we call “human” is already mechanical, rehearsed, synthetic.
The panic around AI isn’t about art, or ethics, or jobs. It’s about the unbearable realization that authenticity has always been a performance—and the machine performs it better. There is no authenticity, especially in art. Authenticity is only a mechanism of judgment—a tool to validate or invalidate, to include or exclude. It functions as a gatekeeper, a boundary drawn in the shifting sand. The only authentic act is to reject the very premise of authenticity and to recognize the raw emergence of being—the gesture before it is named, the becoming before it is categorized.
Work Descriptions
“I like being here” is the opening line of Soledad by Isabelita Virtual. Solitude in addition to feminist resilience is an equation for solace. To be close and far away at the same time, to have the space discover a version of yourself you didn’t know existed. The work demonstrates that self is no longer the excavation of a buried truth, but the conscious and continual act of self-construction—a becoming shaped not by what lies beneath, but by what one dares to create in the open. You’ll like being there, too.
What would the game of telephone look like if it was played by machines? Niklas Poweleit’s Rezyklierung [Recycling] uses three screens to explores how images shift as they pass through different modes of perception and translation. A car moves down a road on the first screen. The second screen breaks this down into data, while the third presents an AI’s attempt to reconstruct the moment from its digital remains. What returns is not the same image, but something altered—reshaped by process and digital interpretation.
The American two-party system has become a theatre of the absurd, where voters are increasingly forced to choose the lesser evil rather than vote their conscience. The Democrats continue to shift rightward, leaving little meaningful opposition to the rise of authoritarianism. Figures like Trump and Elon Musk perform like clowns in a collapsing empire, distracting from the erosion of civil rights and democratic norms with spectacle and ego. Canada’s recent election, where many voted strategically to avoid becoming America’s metaphorical 51st State, only underscores how deeply this dysfunction reverberates beyond U.S. borders. Electoral reform, once promised by Canada’s Liberal Party in 2015, remains unfulfilled, in spite of former Prime Minster’s Justin Trudeau’s empty regrets. What’s left is political stagnation and growing disillusionment. Jess MacCormack’s work—digital or otherwise—cuts through this despair, offering raw, emotional insight. Elections is no exception.
Anna Condo’s Sunday School dismantles the fantasy of a self, replacing it with a figure assembled from digital rubble and a blue-velvet dress with a stiff white collar. The face isn’t hidden—it’s overwritten, remixed, refusing to offer the intimacy we’re conditioned to expect. Behind the figure, the schoolyard contains symbols of early formation: playground equipment, asphalt, and brick walls. These are the sites where norms are rehearsed, where rules are absorbed. But now they are empty, paused and digitally estranged—awaiting another version of childhood to emerge.
There is violence in watching—and a profound violence in the hunger to watch. Mind Wank’s Witness series confronts the grim appetite of our image economy for smiles and selfies. The horror is not the juxtaposition—it is the plausibility. This work does not mourn, it exposes; it reveals how collective trauma can become a backdrop for our own self-aggrandizement. As the towers fall, we can see how history dissolves into spectacle in an endless doom scroll—tragedy repackaged as content.
There exists a subset of AI-generated images and videos that occupy the space between the uncanny valley and the grotesque, unsettling in ways that defy easy categorization. These works generate what might be called the promptum—a visceral, internal jolt that originates not in the mind but in the gut, a sharp disturbance that bypasses language. Offeah by icysaw pushes this sensation to its extreme, creating an immersive experience that feels like stumbling into a box-opening livestream on the deep web—raw, voyeuristic, and teetering on the edge of taboo. The work doesn’t ask for interpretation, offering its hands to the viewer, pulling them into a digital uncanny that feels both eerily familiar and profoundly wrong.
Inspired by Jørgen Leth’s arthouse classic The Perfect Human (1968), Lilan Yang’s work of the same name feeds a low-res YouTube rip of the original into StyleGAN2, forcing the machine to reflect on “the perfect human.” Over 9,000 stills are scraped, processed, and trained into a synthetic fever dream of “perfection.” The result isn’t a remake but a machine hallucination: a visual remix where smooth surfaces hide broken data. These generated images are then dragged back into the physical world as 16mm transparencies, completing a loop from film to algorithm and back. It’s not a question of what the perfect human is—but what happens when a machine tries to make one.
A world where the backs of cars are indistinguishable from their fronts. Che, che, che, che, che check out Maciej Miliszkiewicz’s music video ADHD and join the chain gang. Keep an eye and an ear out for that electronic flute solo.
Uglyy Fruuit’s Parallel daughter and Displace control present an unsettling dive into the world of AI-generated imagery. These works explore the moment when machine learning systems break away from polished imitation and slip into something more unstable—the realm of visual contradiction. Through these glitches and distortions, the system confesses its inhumanity. The results are weird, absurd, and strangely alive. Here is an alt-text description of one of the images in the series: The image depicts a person holding a small, two-story model of a house. The house is constructed from a light-coloured material resembling plywood and is partially covered with white and brown furry textures. It has small window panes, with the main structure appearing handmade and roughly finished. The person holding the house, seen from the side, has short, dark hair and is wearing a pink tank top. A pink wristband is visible on their arm. Surrounding the person are other individuals in casual attire; their expressions and positions suggest they are in a social setting, possibly an event or a gathering.
What begins as a seemingly straightforward desktop documentary quickly spirals into something far more unsettling. Chen Zirui’s Format Error Occurred at Offset dissects how governments collect, control, and distort our images, exposing the fragile and ambiguous nature of identity within bureaucratic systems. In stark contrast, the work interrogates the ways AI image generation is used in the art and culture industries. Culture is not just defined by what it creates, but by what it destroys—and in the AI-driven future, it’s the human subject who disappears first. Beneath the shiny promises of progress, what’s already here is a more efficient, globalized exploitation of the self, and within the paradigm of capitalism, this is often performed under the guise of innovation.