A few weeks ago, a Tumblresque collage of an astronaut riding a horse made the rounds on the internet. Except for a few small glitches—a second hoof on one of the legs and an uncharacteristically bushy tail—there were no visible signs that this picture had been created by the newest version of DALL-E, an artificial-intelligence interface that generates images based on written inputs from users. Amid the excitement over the potential for using natural language processing to produce realistic images, there was an undercurrent of unease about the program’s notional capabilities.

That trepidation is at the core of “Some farmed, others mined,” Davide Balula’s most recent exhibition, currently on view at Galerie Frank Elbaz. For A.I. Generated Instructions, 2022, Balula fed a machine-learning system selections from his own oeuvre and had it create a series of instructions for new works, which he then executed in the gallery. The results are equal parts uncanny valley and Fluxus. Like DALL-E and its glitchy horse, Balula’s AI is unable to fully process abstract language, leading it to spit out garbled commands such as “cultivate the nearest wall with potato chips until the time runs out of flowers.”

For the accompanying “Farmed Paintings,” 2020–21, Balula exposed a series of canvases to organic matter and allowed them to weather and decay, spawning a network of microorganisms that act as coauthors, not unlike the AI. By ceding control, Balula reveals the natural order and innate inconsistencies of these intractable forces.

— Jonah Goldman Kay