“Scribble Scrabble Slop,” a mid-July exhibition of new work by net-art veteran Faith Holland at Microscope Gallery in New York, is part of a small but pointed cluster of shows using generative AI as a subject to be examined rather than a tool to be celebrated. Holland has spent a career making work about the internet’s material and bodily underside — its cables, its pornography, its infrastructure, its glitches — and her turn toward AI comes from that same critically engaged place. The title alone signals the stance: “slop” is the internet’s own word for the flood of low-effort AI-generated content, and Holland takes it as the thing to look at, not look past.
Why critical AI art matters right now
The dominant modes of AI art tend toward two poles: dazzled spectacle on one end, reflexive dismissal on the other. Artists like Holland — and the concurrent New York shows working in a similar vein, such as “We Had Been Citizens of No Country” at Nguyen Wahed — occupy the more useful middle, using the technology to interrogate itself. That means treating a generative model’s failures, excesses, and biases as revealing rather than embarrassing: the artifacts, the uncanny hands, the endless derivative sludge become evidence about what these systems are and what they’re doing to visual culture. It’s the difference between using AI to make a pretty picture and using it to ask a hard question.
Holland’s throughline
What makes Holland a compelling figure here is continuity, not novelty. Her earlier work — turning cables into intimate objects, staging the internet’s carnality — was always about the gap between the network’s clean promises and its messy physical and cultural reality. Generative AI is a natural next target: another technology sold as frictionless magic that, up close, is full of labor, waste, and strangeness. Seeing an artist with that lineage take on “slop” is more interesting than another technologist’s demo, because she arrives with two decades of practice in finding the body and the muck inside the machine.
The gallery-scale counterweight
Museum-scale AI spectacle gets the headlines, but these smaller, sharper gallery shows are where the medium gets genuinely thought through. For the digital artists this site follows, “Scribble Scrabble Slop” is a reminder that the most durable art about a new technology usually comes from people who were already skeptical of the last one — and that the New York gallery circuit, from Microscope to the Tribeca gallery walks happening the same week, remains where that critical work gets tested in public.