Be a Global Citizen… or just look like one.
At a lookout near Mount Fuji there’s a photo op: a cardboard samurai on horseback, the mountain behind it. Stafford Smith , Michele Bosak, Becky Dickenson and I all posed for it. We laughed. We knew it was crass and we did it anyway.
Right then and there, I sketched an ArtPrize idea: a fake world tour, cardboard cutouts from countries all over the world, and at the exit a vending machine stocked with local products, the one souvenir that can’t be faked. All analog. The joke and the point in the same room.
Then I came home, and Aaron Sundman showed me PrismaLive, his generative AI platform. The demo gave Stafford three hands, and we laughed at that too. Stafford took it to his photography class as a party trick. It took me weeks to understand that the two funny things were the same thing. The cutout at Fuji at least required my body: the trip, the mountain, the friends beside me. The AI version requires a selfie. Nobody is fooled either way. Yet we happily accept the flattened version when it’s handed to us with a laugh.
“Be a Global Citizen” opens at ArtPrize 2026 this September at Kendall College of Art and Design. An AI plays the corporation, selling you a smooth, frictionless, beautifully flattened world tour: tap a station, receive a portrait of yourself somewhere you’ve never been, collect the stamp. Beside it, real commercials from the big global brands, in every market they own. And down the hall, a bulletin board. Paper logos, pushpins, a map of local businesses within five blocks of the gallery, run by real people you can walk to and talk to.
The photos above are all of us near Mount Fuji. In one of them, Michele and Becky are holding giant sushi. Only some of these required being there.
