2023AI / Kinetic Art / Installation
Arora Vale
A fictional artist generated entirely by AI systems. Exhibited 2024.
In 2023, Leroy Brothers constructed a fictional artist named Arora Vale using ChatGPT and Midjourney. The construction was total: biography, aesthetic position, body of work, exhibition history — all generated through extended prompt sequences rather than lived experience. Arora Vale has no body, no studio, no trajectory. The persona exists entirely as output.
The first exhibition under Arora Vale's name was held at Toile Blanche Contemporary, Saint-Paul de Vence, in 2024 as part of the Digital Convergence Exhibition. The works shown were large-scale AI-generated images — balloon forms in saturated color, presented as if made by an artist with a distinct visual sensibility and environmental concerns. Visitors encountered the work before encountering the disclosure. The sequence was deliberate.
The project does not argue that AI is creative. It does not argue the opposite. It stages a condition: a body of work that exists, has been exhibited, has a name attached to it, and was produced without a human hand making a single mark. The authorship question the work poses is not philosophical in the abstract — it is administrative. When a gallery accepts a submission, what exactly is it accepting? When a collector acquires a work, what are they acquiring rights to? When a critic reviews the show, who is the subject of the review?
Arora Vale was initiated in early 2023, in the months immediately following the public release of ChatGPT and before generative AI had been formally addressed by any major institution's acquisition policy. That timing is part of the work's material. The absence of institutional frameworks for what Arora Vale represents is not a gap the project seeks to fill — it is the condition the project documents.
The persona is not retired. Its status remains open.
Exhibited: Toile Blanche Contemporary, Saint-Paul de Vence, 2024.
The first exhibition under Arora Vale's name was held at Toile Blanche Contemporary, Saint-Paul de Vence, in 2024 as part of the Digital Convergence Exhibition. The works shown were large-scale AI-generated images — balloon forms in saturated color, presented as if made by an artist with a distinct visual sensibility and environmental concerns. Visitors encountered the work before encountering the disclosure. The sequence was deliberate.
The project does not argue that AI is creative. It does not argue the opposite. It stages a condition: a body of work that exists, has been exhibited, has a name attached to it, and was produced without a human hand making a single mark. The authorship question the work poses is not philosophical in the abstract — it is administrative. When a gallery accepts a submission, what exactly is it accepting? When a collector acquires a work, what are they acquiring rights to? When a critic reviews the show, who is the subject of the review?
Arora Vale was initiated in early 2023, in the months immediately following the public release of ChatGPT and before generative AI had been formally addressed by any major institution's acquisition policy. That timing is part of the work's material. The absence of institutional frameworks for what Arora Vale represents is not a gap the project seeks to fill — it is the condition the project documents.
The persona is not retired. Its status remains open.
Exhibited: Toile Blanche Contemporary, Saint-Paul de Vence, 2024.