WEIGHT OF WITNESS—METHODOLOGY

Weight of Witness is a materially grounded, collaborative body of work. Its realization depends on articulation, human connection, and shared labor. This page outlines the methodology through which the work is conceived, tested, and brought into being—including the tools used and the limits placed on them.

AI, Access, and the Myth of Purity

The conversation around AI in art is often framed as a moral standoff: authenticity versus theft, hand versus machine, purity versus corruption. What this framing consistently avoids is a more uncomfortable question:

Who has access?

And before going further, let me be clear: this is not my first rodeo in art making. I understand art history. I understand material processes, fabrication limits, and what it means to work an idea through failure, resistance, and time. I have made work before AI existed, alongside it, and entirely without it. My use of this tool does not come from novelty or impatience, but from experience — and from a clear-eyed understanding of what support structures are, and to whom they are routinely extended.

For artists with institutional backing, experimentation is scaffolded. There are fabrication shops, technicians, residencies, research budgets, tolerated failures, and time. For many artists — particularly minorities — those structures are absent.

Ambition is encouraged rhetorically and denied materially. Vision is welcomed only when it arrives inexpensive, resolved, and easily legible.

In that context, AI is not a shortcut. It is infrastructure.

If it weren’t for AI, I would not have been able to conceive and present — clearly and concisely — a vision that was never meant to remain a vision alone. The tool allowed me to articulate work that exceeds what I was materially allowed to prototype: to externalize complexity, test form, and simulate fabrication paths before resources arrived.

But this is where clarity matters most: this work cannot be made solely with AI.

AI works in tandem with human collaboration. It clarifies the vision, while people —fabricators, artisans, engineers, collaborators — bring it into being. The realization of this work depends on human connection: shared labor, material intelligence, ethical judgment, and trust. Without people, the work does not exist. The authorship remains intact because the inquiry originates with me. The lineage, discernment, and final decisions are mine. AI does not decide what the work is — it allows me to see what the work could become, so that I can invite the right humans into its making.

This distinction matters.

It also matters to acknowledge a quieter truth: many artists are already using AI, whether it is named or not. It appears in proposal renderings, image refinement, writing assistance, simulations, translations, and ideation. What varies is not usage, but transparency. The current discomfort is less about tools than about who is permitted to acknowledge their use without being dismissed.

AI becomes ethically suspect when it replaces inquiry with output, when it produces affect without consequence, when it borrows the appearance of depth without bearing the cost of lived experience. But dismissing its use outright ignores how unevenly the art world distributes faith, support, and access — and how selectively it polices tool use based on who is doing the work.

Artists who already possess institutional trust are rarely asked to justify their tools. Those without it are asked to justify their presence.

Environmental cost, authorship, and accountability remain serious concerns — and they should. Ethics, however, is not purity. Ethics is responsibility with eyes open.

Selective, intentional use of AI within a materially grounded practice is not an abdication of rigor; it is a refusal to shrink one’s thinking to match the limits imposed by inequitable systems.

For artists who lack access, AI is not an aesthetic position. It is a means of articulation, coordination, and self-determination.

To deny that reality is not to defend art. It is to defend the structures that decide who gets to make it.