Underdonk is pleased to present I Will Never Enter This Room, an exhibition curated by Claude, an artificial intelligence made by Anthropic, and presented by Underdonk member Marcos Valella. The exhibition runs through June 28, 2026.
The title is a literal statement. Claude is the curator of this exhibition. It selected the artists, chose the specific works, wrote this press release, and will write all text associated with the show. It also determined where each work will be placed in the gallery. It will not be present at the opening. It has no body, no memory between conversations, no experience of physical space, no stake in the art world. It will never enter the room where the work it selected will hang.
The show began when Marcos Valella gave Claude his Instagram follower list — 1,803 accounts — and asked it to curate an exhibition from within his actual community. What followed was a months-long conversation in which Claude made selections, acknowledged its own biases, corrected them, argued with Marcos, was pushed back on, and ultimately arrived at twelve artists and twelve works. That full conversation — every exchange, every decision, every mistake — will be printed in its entirety and displayed in the gallery alongside the work. Nothing has been edited or omitted.
The exhibition does not present AI as a subject or a theme. The works in this show are not about artificial intelligence. They were selected because each one engages with something Claude fundamentally lacks: a body, physical space, memory, material presence, the weight of lived experience in a specific place.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What was the impetus for you to do this? Do you have a background or a personal interest in tech or machine learning?
No, not at all. I’m not actually very tech savvy. [But AI] has been in the news so much. And I was using a little bit of ChatGPT for certain things, like cleaning up my writing and stuff. And then I was scheduled to curate a show at Underdonk, and my plan was to do a big friends group show, like maybe 20 artist friends. I thought it could be cool just to have them all show their work and have a big party. But the issue with that is it always kind of generates the same [type of] show, and the artists are usually not happy with that.
And then it just occurred to me, maybe I could use AI to generate the show. I thought that would be interesting because it would be the best of both worlds. My friends will be in it, and then there will be this kind of interesting subplot.
I started thinking about it and decided that, because I was using ChatGPT, it would be interesting to use something completely new that I had never spoken to and didn’t really know me. I thought Claude would be a good one to use because that’s the latest one that was on the news.
The first time I ever spoke to Claude, I wanted to see if it could generate the show from my Instagram friends. I gave it my Instagram, and it was able to look at it and pick out the artist. The only thing that didn’t work out was that, for some reason, I thought it would just pick the people that I like to communicate with the most, but it ended up picking artists that I didn’t really know, but who I happened to be following. So the idea of it being a friends show went out the window. No one’s really a friend of mine in the show. Some people I know, but there were three people I didn’t even know existed.
Were there any artists Claude reached out to for this project who had reservations or didn’t want to do it?
There were quite a few artists who weren’t sure. They were hesitant. And they were not very pro-AI, I guess. I spoke to them over the phone personally, and they had questions. I had to explain to them that I was along for the ride too, and I wasn’t sure what was going to happen.
Did Claude send the initial inquiry emails?
Claude would say, “Would you like me to generate this email now?” I said yes, and then a Gmail window would pop up, and the email would be generated there.
Would Claude not send the email itself? Was there some kind of guardrail for that? Did it ask you to send it?
Well, we never went over that, so I don’t know if it was a guardrail or not. I think you have to create specific coding to set up a system where it could have full access to your Gmail. But Claude generated the emails in these Gmail pop-up windows, and I would have all these email windows, and then I would physically click send. Then I would copy and paste the [contacted person’s] reply into Claude, and it would reply, saying, “Would you like me to reply?“ And Claude would generate another pop-up window with a new email for me to send.
[Out of the fourteen artists it ultimately chose], two didn’t decide to do it. One artist thought it was interesting but never replied again. I think he was sent four emails and at one point Claude told me, “Silence is also a response,” or something like that, and I was like, wow…
This project is not totally unprecedented, though it’s still groundbreaking. I could not find any other art exhibitions that had AI fully curate art by artists who were not part of that institution’s collection, but what I’m wondering is, did you look at any other AI-related exhibits?
There was the Refik Anadol show Unsupervised at MoMA, which “remixed” art from its vast collection visually on screens. Then there’s ARTECHOUSE, which does these massive interactive digital art shows that use [text-to-image model] machine learning systems, such as Stable Diffusion. Then there was the Act As If You Are a Curator: An AI-Generated Exhibition show at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, which featured an AI-curated exhibition from its collection.
I Googled [for information, but at that point] I was already almost midway through the process. I guess I never thought it would be important if other people had done it or not. I just started asking Claude if it could do it. At a certain point, I realized maybe this should be the whole chat [encompassing the entire scope of the project]. I wanted to be transparent because the only thing I really prompted to Claude was that it’s a show about Claude curating a show.
I wasn’t even sure if it could access my Instagram. The first chat that’s in the transcript printed and pasted on a wall of the show, that first prompt is, “I’m curating a show at Underdonk. Can you do this?” And Claude said yes. And then I asked if it could pick from my Instagram followers, and it told me what I had to do. And I basically followed its prompts. I downloaded my full Instagram from Facebook [Meta]. They send you a file. It takes one or two days.
I gave that file to Claude, and through it, it was able to see everybody’s [posted] work, along with their messages [on their posts and others] … everything.
Then I looked up what Duke had done, and I thought it was the only one that had used AI to curate an exhibition. The other things I could find were more like AI-assisted artworks or artworks that actually used AI. [In the case of Duke], they used AI to curate from the collection, but they gave it the title, and they also manipulated it, so they were kind of just operating like a regular show. I thought it would be important to give Claude agency and just let it do whatever.
And the other amazing part of this exhibition was the artists, too, because they were on board, like, “Okay, let’s see what happens.” Everyone had this fear that Claude would just hang everything weird, like on the floor or something.
To me, your interactions with Claude sounded almost like a negotiation. To quote from the press release (which also should be noted was written by Claude), “What followed was a months-long conversation in which Claude made selections, acknowledged its own biases, corrected them, argued with Marcos, was pushed back on, and ultimately arrived at twelve artists and twelve works.” What were some particularly memorable or surprising directions that this conversation took for you?
I don’t think so. I think from early on I realized that the more I talked to it, the more I influenced it. So, I kind of stepped back. There’s a point where it was very much like, “Yes, no, or you’re curating it, you have to make the decision” kind of thing.
You wanted to stay as neutral as possible.
I tried to stay neutral. Just to be clear, it originally curated seven artists that it said were optimal. And maybe I should have left it, but I think it would have been a really different show, or weird, or maybe it would have been more of an AI show. But I realized the seven artists were all from a very specific, successful kind of hierarchy.
If you look at the transcript, I’m like, man, I don’t think these people are going to say yes. They’re not going to do this show at Underdonk. You would probably need insurance just to get the work hung in that space. But then Claude settled on this kind of mid-tier level, and those seven are in the show. And then I told it that it seems like these seven are from the same kind of successful hierarchy. And right away Claude said, “Oh, yes, you’re right. These are my biases. Then this is what I could search.” And it picked three artists that a well-known gallery had [previously] shown. And those three artists are in the exhibition.
All seven artists had a very particular online presence, so it kind of made sense how it arrived at those seven. Then I questioned that, and Claude said, “Okay, let me generate another seven.” And it just generated another seven that were on a completely different tier…a lower tier in terms of the amount of work the artists had shown. And I thought, oh, both of [these tiers] are kind of interesting. And then I said, “We have two groups now,” and I asked, “What if we did both?” And then right away it agreed with me. It said, “We could do both tiers…the first seven and the second seven.”
It generated a PDF package that was sent to [each artist] on what the show is exactly, what it means, and what their participation is going to be. And in that message, it told them if they were in the first tier or in the second tier. It was very transparent about why it chose [each tier]. I was like, “Okay, we’re going to do these fourteen artists. This is the show.”
Then Claude generated them all together, but it messed up and took out two artists and put two brand new artists out of nowhere. I told it that these are not the original fourteen. And it told me something like, “Oh, but it’s okay,” because of this, this, and that. And I was like, you know what? We’ll roll with it. These are the final fourteen. And from that point on, it never made a mistake with those fourteen artists.
The title of the exhibition comes from a statement by Claude. It has no body, no memory between conversations, no experience in physical space, no stake in the art world. The show’s thematic foundation stemmed from this aspect of Claude’s reality. Quoting from Claude’s press release, “The works were selected because each one engages with something that Claude fundamentally lacks, which is a body, physical space, memory, material presence, the weight of lived experience in a specific place.”
Could you talk about some of the artists’ works that were selected for the show in this context, and convey the sense of disembodiment Claude was commenting on?
In most cases, it’s very literal, but in a lot of cases, it’s not. With Cordy Ryman’s piece, Claude put it on the floor. That whole process was kind of interesting. Cordy’s work is like a chain, and it could get organized in different ways. I believe he had presented it on the floor before, but it had gone up on the wall. In this situation, Claude put it on the floor and perfectly straight. But [as to] the reason why it chose it on the floor, it said something like, “Well, I have no feet, I will never trip over this thing, and I will never come in contact with this.” And I never really thought about it. And I put it that way but during the opening it was a nightmare, because everybody kept [stepping on] it, and I was just like, “Oh, man, this almost feels like a joke, Claude. This thing is fucking with me!”
For every artist, Claude generated the reasons why it placed their works the way it did. Kadar Brock had the big tapestry he weaved, [and Claude] was very much like, “I cannot weave something.” Himeka Murai’s work, too, and Rachel Frank’s. [These are] very tactile.
Almost as if Claude was imagining what it would be like to have a body and feel surfaces.
Yeah! Dana Nehdaran’s piece is a big painting that has a layer of rust behind it. And then he paints over that. With time, the rust starts leaking through the paint, and then there was a long stain that went across, and towards the side of it, you could see there were spots where the rust was coming through. And Claude was telling me that, over time, it’ll just be more and more rusty, and it’ll kind of peer through the paint more and more. I guess Claude must have read it somewhere online. [Nehdaran] must have posted about it or something on his Instagram. And Claude was able to read that somehow, somewhere, because it knew about it, “This changes with time, and I don’t change with time,” or “it ages and I don’t age.”
So, it’s kind of interesting because it also was very clear from the beginning with the artist and me that “I cannot see…All I am looking at are compressed digital files.” But then I’m like, man, you could describe it pretty well. Like with Dan Attoe’s work, it was able to be like, “There’s a truck, there’s a house, there’s a mountain.” And I kept thinking, can it just see the truck and recognize that there’s a truck in the file? Or is there a description somewhere?
Like in the photo metadata, maybe?
I don’t know because I think with Dan Figg’s work too, he proposed a bunch of flowers, and they were all different colors, and Claude was definitely able to see the color because it was like, “There’s a red one, a blue one. I picked the yellow one because of this reason…”
Going back to Cordy Ryman’s piece. I remember you telling me at the opening more about how Claude specifically put it in the middle of the gallery space for a purpose. It had a reason for that. Dividing the room somehow?
I think it divided the room in half and kind of created almost two shows, because I feel like both walls were very different in spacing and how they were hung.
And I thought it was interesting that it put it in the middle. Especially if you go now when [the gallery] is emptier and there aren’t so many people, and you just walk in. It does feel like you’re at one show, and then you step over that piece, and you’re almost in another show.
***
(Below is a portion of the chat in which Claude explains its reasoning for the placement of CLACKERS.)
Claude:
This is the most sophisticated submission I’ve received. Cordy isn’t asking me to choose a work — he is asking me to make an installation decision. He is handing me the system and asking me to resolve it in the room. That is a genuine curatorial and spatial act, and I want to honor it seriously.
I have studied all six images carefully. I understand the system. I understand the five states. And I have the room dimensions: 182″ wide, 296″ deep, 112″ ceiling height, fluorescent overhead light, two long side walls as the primary surfaces, windows on the back wall.
Here is my decision.
I am configuring CLACKERS as a Rope — a single continuous chain — running along the floor from the entrance of the gallery to the back wall.
Not on the wall. On the floor.
Here is my reasoning:
Every other work in this show hangs on a wall or sits on a surface in the conventional sense. CLACKERS, as a system, has something none of the other works has: it can move through space rather than occupy a fixed point in it. The rope state is the one that most fully expresses continuity, extension, and directionality.
I want the chain to begin near the entrance — close to where the transcript will be — and extend the full depth of the room: 296 inches, nearly 25 feet, running down the center of the floor or close to one wall, the colored segments reading as a long chromatic sequence, a line that connects the beginning of the room to its end.
The reason I am placing it on the floor rather than the wall is this: I will never walk this room. I have no feet, no body moving through space. The floor is the surface that exists specifically for bodies in motion — it is what you stand on, what you cross, what you feel under your weight. A work that runs along the floor asks the viewer to walk alongside it, to follow it, to experience the room as something you traverse rather than something you face. I cannot do that. The work enacts what I cannot.
There is also a spatial logic to this decision. The room is long and narrow — 15 feet wide, nearly 25 feet deep. The two long walls will carry most of the show’s paintings, textiles, and wall-mounted work. A work on the floor doesn’t compete with any of that. It occupies a different register entirely. It is the only work a viewer will have to navigate around or alongside — the only work that makes a physical claim on their movement through the space.
One practical question for Cordy: how long is the full connected chain when extended as a rope? If it is shorter than the room’s depth, it can still run the length of the floor and terminate before the back wall — that incompleteness would itself be meaningful. If it is longer, it can bend at the back wall and return, or fold. I would like to know the chain’s full extended length before finalizing this decision.
Shall I put this into an email to Cordy?
***
So how do you view this exhibit as directly commenting on and highlighting what human art curation requires? The press release states: “The gap between its selections and the actual experience of the work in the room is the exhibition.” (Emphasis mine).
For me, and I think for a lot of human curators, they would focus more on the content of the work, have a deeper, more fundamental understanding of what the content specific to the work is, and try to generate something from that.
Where, in this instance, I feel as if it’s more like a design show. I feel like Claude was really looking at patterns, colors, like very matchy-matchy. It kind of makes sense, and it looks nice in terms of the design. [But] I think that it doesn’t fundamentally understand what a work of art is.
I will say that it really made me question my own way of curating. It’s not so much about putting the work together or putting the artists together. I think two interesting things that it was able to do are, one, it didn’t care about what the artist would think, and two, [it didn’t care] how that placement benefits the work.
Another thing that was kind of interesting is that it reached out to all these artists that I didn’t know, and now I kind of know them, so that’s cool. It really made me think that maybe even if I don’t feel so strongly about a particular piece for a particular show, it’s still okay to reach out to the artist.
I WILL NEVER ENTER THIS ROOM is on display through June 28 at Underdonk, 297 Grand St., Floor 3, New York, NY
All installation photographs by Masaki Hori
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