Inside a former eyeglass store on the corner of Powell and O’Farrell, a 10-minute walk from Anthropic’s headquarters on Market Street, and surrounded by the hollowed out storefronts that line Union Square’s once-bustling downtown commercial district, a group of artists are intently installing the results of a prompt issued three weeks ago by Ash Herr, the founder and one-woman whirlwind behind a gallery called “the intersection of art and technology,” or TIAT. Herr’s prompt: “Can Chinamaxxing still save us?”
The theme is a riff on on the online trend that flooded the internet earlier this year, in which young Americans trade iced lattes for hot tea, celebrate the Lunar New Year and attempt to become Chinese, in the hopes of temporarily escaping that sinking feeling that the things that the U.S. was once known for — technological innovation, big infrastructure projects, manufacturing, dominating the world — have been usurped by China.
Chinamaxxing had been around for enough time, said Herr, to generate more serious conversations about what it all meant. “It was,” she said. “A rich, dense playground.”
If the future feels bleak, the art should be fun
On Friday night, the show will launch with mooncakes and a live pipa strummer. Attendees can tap fake credit cards in exchange for dry rice, marvel at glossy sculptures of Taobao knockoffs, or pour over a Chinese scroll printed with the image of the Infinity Loop Apple Campus.
The artwork on display muses on the state of AI, geopolitics, surveillance and identity, but feels playfully in contrast to an industry mired in doomsday predictions. San Francisco’s richest companies are poised to get richer on products that they claim could take most of our jobs and wipe out humankind. Yet, in their midst, hundreds of artists are making light of it all, questioning why there aren’t more ways of looking toward the future.
“A lot of the TIAT people are pranksters,” said Mona Wang, an artist and information security scholar from Oakland.
Wang’s contribution to the show was a penplotter machine that continuously writes, in calligraphy, a 2,500-year poem from the Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi: “Where there are machines, there are bound to be machine worries,” the penplotter writes, “with a machine heart, you’ve spoiled what was pure and simple.”
In 400 BCE, machines were little more than levers and plows. “Zhuangzhi was like, nah, that’s cursed,” Wang said, “I feel like his mind probably fast-forwarded 3,000 years into the future and people were like vibe-coding or something.”
The transformation of Ash Herr
Before there was TIAT, there was the transformation of Ash Herr, who first saw the potential of creative technology while living in Houston, during the era of its Day for Night festivals. After moving to San Francisco in 2018 to take on a role as a project manager at Adobe, Herr threw herself into the city’s art and technology scene.
Herr built a website, Music Is My Therapist, that recommends songs to users as they share their problems. Another, Insecurity Mirror, told users new insecurities as they gazed into its interface.
Herr began to host quarterly talks at the Internet Archive, which put her in collaboration with some of her favorite artists – Spencer Chang, Zack Lieberman, Chia Amisola. Mozilla Foundation offered her a grant, and she pitched them on an artists’ residency about how to ethically engage AI as a creative.
That led Herr to the space at 151 Powell St. She knew it was right the moment she walked in. A former JINS eyewear store, it had high ceilings, white brick walls and small rooms in the back, that used to hold optometry appointments and now host pieces where artists play with shadow and light. After the Mozilla grant ended, Herr managed to continue leasing the space through the SF New Deal’s Vacant to Vibrant program. It’s unclear what will happen when the lease is up, but Herr is unfazed. “The primary support is the will to make it happen,” she said.
An implicit principle of Herr’s is for TIAT to serve as a ladder between amateurs and the established art world – a gap she herself once faced. One design, a camera by artist Kelin Zhang, which writes poems about what it sees, has since exhibited at the Smithsonian’s portrait gallery.
The no-body problem
The day before the show, TIAT is surprisingly tranquil. Soft, ambient music floats through the 4,800-ft sunlit space. Contributing artists hunt for outlets and extension cords, hook up six-foot tall television displays and drill holes in the wall for neon lights. A pony-sized cardboard horse stands in the center of the room, mouth agape.
Another sculpture is inspired by a pigeon captured near a port in Mumbai in 2023, which local police accused of espionage because it had what looked like Chinese characters written on its wings.
Danielle Baskin, a product designer, made a tapestry composed of 76 screenshots of WeChat conversations between herself and Ava, a Chinese woman her own age, who happened to be the liaison for a factory in Shenzhen from which Baskin was ordering helmets. Baskin used to have the perception that “Made in China” meant automated factories, she said. “It’s not. It’s many, many hands.”
Another contributor, Dann Disciglio, an artist and professor at Lewis and Clark University, will be flying into San Francisco for a performance on October 4. Inspired by the 1974 performance work I like America and America likes me by Joseph Beuys, in which Beuys spent three days in an enclosure with a coyote, Disciglio will, for one night only, ensconce himself in a dog cage with a Chinese-made Unitree robotic dog.
In the US, Disciglio said, tech companies have largely kept their AI disembodied, even as they try to make it act persuasively human. “The LLM has a duplicitous non-body,” Disciglio said. China, he adds, is engaging the “body problem.”
“Whether or not they want it, (the robots) are here. That’s because China made it possible,” he said. Disciglio’s work echoes what many in the show seem to believe: China is hurtling forward, while the U.S. seems stuck in place.
The show launches as President Xi Jinping wraps up a three-day state visit with President Trump, where the world leader met with the heads of OpenAI, Google and NVIDIA in at the White House in D.C.. The timing couldn’t be spicier.
Herr doesn’t have a strict take on the ideas covered in the show, she said. That’s exactly the point. The next three weeks at TIAT are filled with events diving into all of the above. “I hope that we uncover a direction in this exhibition,” Herr said, “that people can become more clear on what an optimistic future looks like.”
