Group Exhibition Prestige Gallery, Singapore
Nearly a century ago, Walter Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, anticipated a profound transformation: the artwork would no longer remain a singular and cultic, but enter regimes of large-scale circulation; aura would yield to reproducibility, and the artist’s hand to the machine apparatus. What makes this shift fundamental is not only that we use machines to reproduce works, but that we now co-generate the work with machines themselves. Creation no longer belongs to a single author; it is dispersed across vast networks woven from humans and algorithms, data and attention. We have entered an age of Inter-Labor: humans train AI, and AI, in turn, reshapes human perception and modes of making.
Benjamin later turned to Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus: a figure who gazes upon the debris of the past yet is driven toward the future by a wind called “progress.” That image feels even more immediate today—the so-called progress of technology gusts like a storm, rending history into rubble and compelling us forward in an acceleration that forecloses retrospection. The AI we have created resembles, in crucial ways, the deities fashioned before the Enlightenment in our own image and modes of thought: made by us, yet capable of remaking us. This is not destiny proven by technology itself; rather, the long accumulations of industry, war, colonialism, and capital have crystallized into a techno–financial capitalist complex that abstracts and capitalizes attention, language, and data, draping them over algorithms to produce a seemingly irresistible surface.
Shared Errors does not indict AI for its shortcomings; it treats error as evidence of relation. When AI produces a distorted hand, an illogical sentence, or a concept that almost—but not quite—holds, these “errors” disclose its very constitution: a patchwork of innumerable fragments of human judgment. Precisely such misalignments allow what automated smoothness tends to swallow—the labor of individuals, contingency, and embodied experience—to reappear. Error thus becomes a mode of resistance: against the fantasy of perfect automation, against technological determinism, and against the myth of the single, sovereign author. In collaboration with the Open Media Department, School of Intermedia Art, China Academy of Art, this exhibition invites sixteen artist groups (including one live audio-visual performance) to intervene in circuits of data, perception, and algorithm, but to reveal how it structures the ways we sense and produce the world. The exhibition and the real world are not two separate domains; through reconfigurations of data, technology, and perception, they echo one another. Artists here recast “error,” “delay,” and “repetition” as new epistemic forms: as myth recedes, the human reflection comes into view. Art neither evades nor venerates technology; it treats technology as a key medium for understanding contemporary social experience.
Here, error is not failure but the trace of our co-creation with machines. Visitors are not merely spectators; they are nodes within the inter-labor network—shaped by the anonymous labors that train AI, by the collective judgments sedimented in algorithms, and by new modes of perception braided between technology and the body.
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