The “Before Midjourney” exhibition, described as “before the access to the free (since 2024) version of the most popular artificial intelligence app, which from entered phrases generates images” centers around the issues of environmental, societal, and ethical consequences of artificial intelligence use in amateur and professional artistic activity. However, it above all concentrates on concepts such as originality, authenticity, talent, and physical experience.

The lack of clear legislation regarding copyright laws for content created by AI, but also the data on which algorithms are trained; the resignation from learning and perfecting crafts and the lack of elementary basics in the scope of art education – theoretical and practical – in young generation’s artists – these are topics we want to think about today because tomorrow they will increasingly shape our visual surroundings.

In the exhibition “Before Midjourney” we show representative fragments of the works of Polish authors, whose images/objects have been created without the use of AI, but the aesthetic of which falls into what AI is most eagerly trained to generate. The starting point for the setup of the exhibition was the idea of referencing in a minimalistic, abstract way the arrangement of circuit boards in CPU. When we look up the phrase “AI graphic symbol”, the result will be examples of graphic diagrams, based on which we built a geometric composition. Imperfect, but consolidated. By a shared problem.

Before Midjourney is an exhibition about the past, about what is here and now, and what is coming. It is a comparison of three differing creative attitudes, which stand in opposition to the ever constant attempts at diminishing the importance of talent in art in both aspects of life – the real and the virtual. Painting, graphics, drawing and sculpture exist here in reality, in a specific place and time. They invite to focus on a detail without pixels, and to leave in contemplation. The physicality of those works is at one’s fingertips, in the line of sight. On a scale of humanity, in the human form, artists stand “face to face” with artificial intelligence.