1998: Uncanny Valley

Uncanny Valley is a solo exhibition by Laurie Simmons, the legendary New York artist whose five-decade career spans photography, film, and installation. Since the 1970s, Simmons has created images with nonlinear narratives and psychological subtext through photography, film, sculpture, and most recently, painting.

Uncanny Valley brings together Simmons' recent AI-assisted work: the Autofiction films and the Autofiction: My Collaborator image series. The films stage real and imagined scenes from Simmons' life, conceived from text prompts she wrote for the AI model that she then edited together with music and narration. For Autofiction: My Collaborator, the artist created her own AI image model based on her five-decade photographic archive. She then prompted the model to generate images incorporating architecture, designer interiors, doll figures, and human characters, then edited each image by hand into a new body of work. To viewers, the resulting scenarios seem familiar yet estranged: the uncanny valley.