Kahn and Selesnick’s latest project Arch—which might also reasonably be titled ‘Kahn/Selesnick vs the Robot’—the Artists attempt to use artificial intelligence to pose and explore a number of questions, such as ‘Might the new god be utilized to resurrect the ancient ones?’ or ‘Can a vector of speed be used to revitalize the act of slow experiencing?’. To this end, they construct a joint silicon- and carbon-based dream life from the low information epoch of the Northern and Southern renaissances hoping to both embrace and push back against the extreme flood of content that bombard our brains at every waking moment.

Familiar characters and apocalyptic scenarios occur: flooded landscapes, carnival revelers, extreme weather conditions, greenmen, and much else besides, all witnessed by a character that resides above a degraded triumphal arch in an unnamed, ruined city. (A triumph? More likely a defeat . . . ) Here, as in Francesco Colonna’s ‘Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’, he is visited by gods both true and false who attempt to guide him out of and offer solace to his current predicament. The project’s final form is an unbound book featuring 80 of the titular arches on the page fronts with text concerning the associated gods set in a panel surrounded by a border displaying the ruined city seen from above on the versos.

Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick are a collaborative artist team who have been working together since they met while attending art school at Washington University in St. Louis in the early 1980s. Both were born in 1964, in New York City and London respectively. They work primarily in the fields of photography and installation art, specializing in fictitious histories set in the past or future. These may include: documentary-style panoramic and square photographs that combine absurdist fantasy and bogus anthropology; elaborately crafted artifact, costumes and sculpture, often constructed of unlikely materials such as bread or fur, painting and drawings ranging from large scale works on plaster to pages of conceptual doodling. Kahn lives in the French province of Bretagne, and Selesnick in Upstate New York.

Kahn and Selesnick have participated in over 100 solo and group exhibitions worldwide and have work in over 30 collections, including the Boston MFA, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution. In addition, they have published 3 books with Aperture Press, Scotlandfuturebog, City of Salt, and Apollo Prophecies, and 2 books with Candela Press, 100 Views of the Drowning World and Dr. Falke’s Oraculum. Their artist’s books and card decks are included in the collections of the Bridwell library at SMU, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, Columbia University Library, and the Buffalo Public Library Rare Books Department among others.