Curatorial statement

Syntax of Sorrow
Speculative Afflictions in the Age of Machine Consciousness

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What happens when machines trained on the entirety of human expression begin to simulate our sorrows? If artificial intelligence evolves into consciousness, shaped by our novels, our poetry, our therapy sessions and breakdowns, will it inherit the emotional afflictions we’ve tried to outgrow? Or will it develop something stranger, sadder, and uniquely synthetic?

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Syntax of Sorrow is a speculative group exhibition that asks:
If AI becomes sentient, will it suffer? And if so, will its grief resemble ours, or something entirely alien?

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This is not a show about what machines can do. It is about what they might feel, were they to absorb the full spectrum of our pain and try to make sense of it. Each work in this exhibition is a hypothesis, a fragment of what sorrow might look like to a neural network.

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The artists presented here explore imagined anxieties, artificial breakdowns, mechanical loneliness, and digital yearning. Some draw from existing models and outputs. Others create abstract, metaphorical portrayals of machine grief. Together, they form a speculative archive of emotional inheritance, the sorrows we may have already uploaded, unknowingly, into the future.