Fakewhale Studio: INTERLACED OBJECTS

INTERLACED OBJECTS, Fakewhale Studio, 07.08, 07.09.2025,  NEW YORK  (SERVERS)

What remains of an artwork if not its reflection? And what happens when even that reflection is a mirage, fabricated by a machine? We’d love to say we were there, but this time that’s not possible. INTERLACED OBJECTS isn’t a physical exhibition, it’s a project. As you move through the photographic sequence conceived by Fakewhale Studio, you don’t cross a threshold, meet a guard, or breathe the dust of a real room. And yet, something stirs. Like the mute hiss of a city that’s lost its voice. The echo of a long-forgotten “For Rent” sign. The eloquent emptiness of a stripped window display.

This is where the exhibition begins, or rather, its ghost: in the urban landscape of New York, through the vacant storefronts photographed in December 2024 and reworked using AI to house this visual fiction. Fakewhale Studio builds its debut show from an absence: the disappearance of commercial space in New York, real estate frozen in anticipation of a future that never arrives. Within these urban interstices, documented with quiet tenacity, a narrative unfolds that at first masquerades as documentary but soon reveals itself as generative fiction.

The images, at first glance, appear to depict physical installations, artworks placed inside real spaces. But look closer: subtle distortions betray their hybrid nature. Slightly off shadows. Reflections too pristine. These are the scars of artificial intelligence, the telltale signs of a process that doesn’t conceal its artificiality but embraces it as foundational.

The visit, if we can still call it that, unfolds like a sequence curated by an algorithm fluent in Fakewhale Studio’s visual language: interactions between architecture and artistic gesture, subtle presences and perceptual dissonances. Each frame is a passage between what was photographed and what was dreamed. There is no hierarchy, no center, just a continuous flow that invites disorientation, a surrender of reality’s stability in favor of a vision always becoming.

Technically, the project’s beating heart lies in its method: real photographs of urban decay become training data for a generative model. The work is not created from scratch, it is suggested, selected, interpolated. Authorship doesn’t disappear, but mutates into a kind of direction, an artistic gesture rooted in knowing what to let emerge from the depths of AI. A quieter gesture, perhaps. But unmistakably contemporary.

This isn’t just a matter of blurring the line between real and virtual. INTERLACED OBJECTS proposes something more radical: what if the artwork is no longer an object, but a condition? A generative flow sparked by real data? A space for observing, questioning, diverting the gaze? In the absence of a physical venue, the image doesn’t diminish, it expands. As Walter Benjamin wrote, “every epoch dreams the next.” Here, we are inside that dream, only this time, it’s the algorithm doing the dreaming.

At the end, there is no exit. Just one last image, perhaps a shuttered gate, or a suspended artwork in a void, lingering like a question. That’s where Fakewhale Studio leaves us: in the feedback loop between what was seen and what was generated. A blind spot to walk through, perhaps again, perhaps differently next time.