How is artistic creation evolving in a world grappling with artificial intelligence?

For the MCA’s 2025 Circular Quay Foyer wall commission, Diena Georgetti (b. 1966, Mparntwe/Alice Springs) tackles this question head-on by using AI – the ability of machines to complete tasks usually requiring human intelligence – in the creation of her work.

Usually, I work with images and get the words and meaning afterwards. This work is ideas based – it’s prompted with words, and those words quickly become ideas.

(Diena Georgetti)

Using an AI image generator, trained to recognise the relationship between millions of pictures and their captions, Georgetti has produced a collection of digital images. She has transformed these images into the paintings and prints that make up this commission, titled The civilisation of the abstract. Depicting artists, art objects and people looking at art, these works also reflect her interest in how art is made, presented and experienced today.

Georgetti’s approach builds on her longstanding practice of borrowing and remixing diverse imagery and styles. She draws from analog sources, like magazines and catalogues, as well as the internet, creating collages that serve as the basis for her abstract paintings. Like an electronic musician, Georgetti samples, manipulates and recombines her found material until the original sources are barely discernible, creating new or unexpected meanings and associations.

By using AI, the artist harnesses the enormity of the internet to an even greater extent than in the past. She embraces the sometimes uncanny nature of AI generated images and their attempts to mimic art styles or movements, incorporating these non-human touches in her work. In doing so, Georgetti blends traditional methods of art-making with emerging technologies.