Algorithmic Ennui (I Will No Longer Make Boring AI Art), 2022
In dialogue with John Baldessari’s 1971 seminal conceptual piece I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, Travis LeRoy Southworth’s Algorithmic Ennui (I Will No Longer Make Boring AI Art) shifts the performative task of repetitive writing from human to machine, challenging notions of authorship, intent, and the aesthetics of boredom versus beauty.
While Baldessari manually repeated the phrase as both a declaration and ironic performance of creative exhaustion, Southworth outsources his slighly altered phrase to an early text-to-image machine learning model, prompting the algorithm to endlessly simulate handwriting within notebook pages. Yet, as the AI system repeatedly fails at literal replication—generating scrambled phrases such as “I Art Longer,” “AI Not Me” and “I Will No Longer Art Or AI”—it produces moments of accidental poetry and subtle abstraction. Here, errors become revelations: the algorithmic misunderstandings mirror our own existential absurdities and an unpredictable beauty emerges.
Continuing Southworth’s exploration of digital identity, algorithmic error, and the relationship between legibility and meaning, the work foregrounds the poetic potential of technological failure. The series consists of 101 algorithmically generated notebook renderings, which suggests a perpetual beginnerhood, like a “Writing 101” course, reflecting the repetitive, often futile cycle of learning shared by both humans and machines.
Algorithmic Ennui (I Will No Longer Make Boring AI Art) ultimately reconfigures Baldessari’s statement as a nuanced question: when algorithms seek to replicate our human gestures and desires, what emerges from their misinterpretations—and what does it reveal about our persistent, often absurd attempts to be seen and understood?