Research
Exquisite Corpse
The foundation of Artificial Intelligence Exploration
Philosophy
Sartre, Kierkegaard, Warhol, Kearney: Post-Modern Image Culture and Consciousness
Research Paper Preview
Abstract of research paper for Independent Study
2025 fall research contributions
How my process from last semester informed my Senior Project
My practice has always been rooted in gesture and the physical act of making. Working with AI was never about replacement, but finding out what happens when something that does not think or feel is asked to continue a mark that came from a body that does.
The Exquisite Corpse
The method I keep returning to is the exquisite corpse. This is a Surrealist technique for letting the unconscious bleed between collaborators. Here, I replace the collaborator with a machine focusing only on pattern and prediction, challenging the recreation of humanness and emotion in the digital space.
The human intervention is where the feeling returns. My research into the uncanny valley started because AI generated figures often register as hollow absences. Through direct manipulation and response, I give the machine's continuation its final and necessary emotional weight.
My work is shaped by a body of philosophical reading that helped me understand what artificial intelligence cannot do, and why my own process insists on the hand. Jean-Paul Sartre, in The Imaginary, describes imagination as an act of negation, meaning that to imagine something is to hold the real at a distance and give form to what is absent. Without that interior act of refusal, what looks like expression is only the world repeating itself back. Søren Kierkegaard adds that imagination requires a self capable of being existentially transformed by what it projects, a slow ordeal of becoming that cannot be bypassed by the production of an image. Richard Kearney, building on both thinkers, argues that every act of imagination involves someone saying something to someone about something, which means an image is responsible because it is first a response to another.
Andy Warhol's serigraph of Marilyn Monroe shows how a public face can keep circulating after it has separated from the life it seems to reveal, leaving Norma Jean, the suffering person whose life the persona consumed, absent from the very image meant to be hers. In March 2016, Microsoft released a chatbot named Tay onto Twitter, designed to learn from users and respond in the voice of a teenage girl. Within sixteen hours, Tay was producing racist and antisemitic content, and Microsoft pulled her offline. Tay was not thinking the way a human does; she was reproducing patterns from the data around her, mimicking the social form of imaginative expression while lacking the consciousness and responsibility that would make it answerable.
Tay matters to my work because she represents the limit case of postmodern image culture, a voice constructed from stored discourse that enters a relation of address before there is anyone inside it who can answer for the speech. My process responds to this inheritance by returning to the body as the place where negation, suffering, and answerability are still located. The hand cannot generate what it has not first hesitated over, and the figure cannot be drawn without the pressure of a body that has been somewhere. The work begins where the image would otherwise close upon itself, and insists that consciousness, limitation, and the trace of a decision still belong to what an image is.
Philosophy
The following is an abstract of "AI as a Digital Collaborator," my independent study research paper completed at Boston College in spring 2026. The full paper explores the possibility of working with artificial intelligence as a creative partner, though I did not begin the project with the conception that AI in itself is creative. It started with my own body. Because of my connective tissue disorder, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, I did not have the physical capacity to sustain two full painting projects, and so my independent study became more research-based and procedural. The human figure followed and became the place where I could test what AI could and would not understand. The paper situates AI within its longer history of statistical models, IQ testing, and eugenic thinking, drawing on Valerie Veatch's documentary Ghost in the Machine to argue that AI is not neutral or inevitable because it is built from histories of racial bias, hidden labor, and techno-capitalist fantasy. It examines the infrastructural cost of these systems, from rural American farmland being sold for data centers, to the Kenyan workers paid less than two dollars an hour to filter violent content so that platforms like ChatGPT can function safely for users in the Global North. My methodology was informed by the AI artists Sougwen Chung, Refik Anadol, Anna Ridler, and Mario Klingemann, though my work differs from theirs in that it focuses on AI's failure with uncertainty and abstraction rather than its capacity for resolved output. I turned to the Surrealist method of exquisite corpse to test whether AI could partner with the hand, and its failures generated a feedback loop of hand, image, prompt, model output, and then hand again. The paper closes with the question of what we are willing to lose in the name of efficiency, and whether we will notice when it is gone.
Research Paper Abstract
My senior project, "Body:", is not a continuation of "AI as a Digital Collaborator." The independent study was procedural research that asked what could be made with AI. The senior project is what was made after it, and it is the work of a painter situating herself as a painter. I am no longer trying to test the limits of a system. I am embracing what I have always been, which is someone who needs to be in a room with paint on her hands. My studio is a small dark green room I painted myself, a cave I disappear into for entire days at a time. It is incredibly messy, and the mess is not incidental to the work but a condition of it. Coffee has spilled onto canvases I refused to move. Dirt has worked itself into the surfaces of pieces left on the floor. One painting has holes in it and another has been chipped and scraped where other paint dried on top of it and pulled away. These are not damages to the work but evidence of a body inside it. Jackson Pollock made the floor of the studio his surface, and the chaos around the painting was the condition of the painting, not its enemy. I take that precedent seriously. To be a painter is to let the room leave its trace, to let the time spent become part of what is visible, and to refuse the cleanliness that artificial intelligence keeps trying to give back to me. The senior project is where I stop testing the machine and let the hand decide.
https://padlet.com/buckleaq/senior-project-szrifeq87xam510b
My Work in Context
My Senior Project began in the fall of 2025, with Professor Sheila Gallagher, when I spent the semester building the conceptual and physical foundation that everything since has rested on. That fall opened in grief and closed in the body. I was carrying the weight of my uncle's stroke and the memory of my mother's passing, and I thought I wanted to make work about wax and candles and the fragility of life. By week two, I had written in my sketchbook for the first time about my Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome as a privileged disability, meaning one easier to hide than to disclose, and from that point on the body became the only honest subject I could find. Out of that research came what I called a personal trinity. The jaguar carried my mother, drawn from American traditional tattoo imagery and my background in tattooing, and became a charged talisman of survival. Saint Thérèse carried my uncle, the ethereal and the divine. My own body became the place where the earthly and the spiritual were forced to meet. Reading Johanna Hedva's writing on sick women and political bodies changed how I understood the work, because she argues that being unable to participate in public space does not make a person less political, and that the body itself becomes the site of resistance. After Hedva, I stopped softening or metaphorizing my disability and let the work carry it directly. Many of the pieces in this exhibition are continuations of objects I made that semester. The large ink drawings with text, as seen in the links below, layered over the figure became the surfaces I returned to with my hand. The hours I spent photographing with my biological father, capturing the way our joints hyperextend, became the precedent for the chicken-skin self-portraits I would later use to test what AI could and could not understand about the body. What fall 2025 gave me was a body of work that already had a center. When I introduced AI in the spring, I was not searching for a subject. I was testing whether anything outside the body could meet what was already there. The conclusion I reached that fall has only deepened since: vulnerability is not a weakness, and making visible what is usually hidden is an act of resistance.
https://padlet.com/gallagso/senior-project-1-fall2025-enl7m3sqlo3zoxv3