A detail from “Monuments,” where algorithmic instructions build and dismantle block-like forms, highlighting the procedural nature of Jensen’s process.

The folks at Craft Lake City, Utah’s Do-It-Yourself festival, can’t have been unaware of the irony: for their latest “Celebration of the Hand” exhibit they’ve curated works executed by a robotic arm. Cheeky buggers.

Displayed outdoors on the Museum of Temporary Change’s placards, Emergence features reproductions of 14 large-scale works created by a mix of  human intention and mechanical execution. Utah-based digital artist Andrew Jensen, a software engineer, writes the code that becomes instruction, but he neither guides nor executes the line. The algorithm generates the work, which is then rendered by a robotic arm holding a pen.

On display along Salt Lake City’s Broadway, Emergence features three sets of works, each image showing a piece in various stages of execution, accompanied by signage that breaks down the process into neat steps. “Flow Fields” offers a recipe for drawing fluid, organic lines: create a grid, pick a few starting points, then let the algorithm tell the pen where to wander. “Monuments” is less lyrical, more architectural—blocks stacked up by one algorithm are systematically demolished by another. “Reactions” goes further still, simulating diffusion systems, then rendering the results in tidy ink. The explanations read less like artist statements than lab manuals.

“Flow Fields” demonstrates how code directs a robotic arm to create organic, fluid lines, part of Andrew Jensen’s Emergence series for Craft Lake City’s Celebration of the Hand.

For a series called “celebration of the hand,” Emergence  is almost a celebration of its absence. And in this way, the project embodies the uneasy state of art-making in 2025: still tethered to human intention, but increasingly outsourced to automation.

In an age when many working artists cower beneath the impending wave of AI-generated images, Jensen is almost a luddite. His images are still analog, in a way: something physical—the robot arm—is doing the drawing to create a physical artifact (although what we’re looking at outdoors at the Museum of Temporary Change are, by necessity, reproductions). On his website, Jensen explains the difference between his process and that of AI-generated images. In the latter, he says,  “the ‘input’ is a typed out prompt, as well as a huge number of images across the internet that a neural network has analyzed. The neural network takes in these inputs and calculates what the output image should be based on statistical probabilities. In the style of art that I create, the ‘input’ is computer code that I write and execute. It can be referred to as ‘procedural art’ because it relies on ‘procedures’ or functions defined in the code to determine the output image. There are no other images being fed into an algorithm as inputs.”

Jensen isn’t ripping anyone off. His images aren’t particularly striking, either. “Monuments” resembles computer graphics from your parents’ childhood. “Flow” is more organic, with a rough resemblance to the drawings of Al Denyer. Stress on the rough. Denyer works from topographic maps and aerial perspective, adding richness and layers to her images. And she draws each line by hand.

Increasingly, we’ll need to ask ourselves if that matters. Spend a little time on social media and you’ll sense the AI anxiety engulfing artists. Provo’s The Compass Gallery recently posted a video celebrating the various styles of art they enjoy. Anything but AI art was the message. Elsewhere on my feed, a mural artist’s cri de cœur to her community lamented the use of AI in their mural designs. Something, she felt, was lost in these designs.

Indeed, artists increasingly talk about how there is something missing from AI-generated art. The “soul” of the artist, if you will. But, apart from the six-figured hands, can you really tell? Several surveys online will prompt you to decide which images are AI-generated. How uncanny will the AI-valley be in a year or two? When will Malcolm Gladwell gather gallerists and museum experts for a “blind” taste test to see if even the most trained eyes can tell the difference.

Will we increasingly be drawn to look for artworks that show the wabi-sabi of human imperfection—a stray fingerprint from greasy fingers, a drop of coffee or spittle on white paper, hair from a brush or beard stuck in oil paint? That can only last as long as it takes someone to prompt AI—like a high schooler telling ChatGPT to introduce spelling mistakes and other errors into their essays—to add these flourishes.

Some will lean (even more) into the story behind the hand, so that biography will increasingly serve as a means to separate artists. We won’t be critiquing art much from a formalist or structuralist perspective, but selling the biography. Social media is already training us to do that. It’s almost as if an algorithm is guiding our hand.

The taggers likely didn’t know the added commentary they were providing when they graffitied many of the placards in Emergence.

Craft Lake City invites the public to participate in a virtual Lunch and Learn about Emergence on September 16 at 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.