You are really here…

photo of Aaron Sundman and Ritsu Katsumata, taken at Woodbridge N Ferris Building, 17 Pearl Street Grand Rapids by Elise Kutt on August 19, 2026

For three weeks at ArtPrize, half the people who walked into my installation hated it on sight and looked at me with disgust. The other half were genuinely joyful, seeing themselves in exotic places on large screens as part of an artwork.

In “Be a Global Citizen… or just look like one,” Aaron Sundman and I used AI to dress visitors up as clownish national stereotypes in places they’ve never been, then sent them on foot to real local businesses. It intentionally created an experience of distrust to make the fake more visible, and it finished in the top five of the popular vote for New Media.

I expected the boos. “AI cannot make art. Period.” “BOOOO TO AI SLOP.” We agree! That was the point. What I didn’t expect was the comment from someone who read my entire artist page, and concluded that if the piece were anti-AI, I would have said so. They wanted me to disavow AI.

I’m not anti-AI. I’m also not a maximalist. I’m a daily user who plans to build things I couldn’t build before, including this experience that criticizes the corporate advertising industry I spent 30 years in. The slop on the screens was made at human prompting, pushed into foolishness so its fakeness would be impossible to miss. The AI is not the clown. We are.

This is the conversation that my piece was meant to create, and the angry critics and technologists need to sit down and start having these difficult discussions. Instead of picking a side and denouncing the other, let’s put the phones down and start being in the same room. You are really here.