AI: Artificial Identity

In Artificial Identity (Ai), Demi Padua turns his gaze toward the shifting landscape of creativity in the age of artificial intelligence. With a few well-worded prompts, tasks once reserved for trained specialists—architects, designers, artists—can now be carried out by anyone. This democratization, while remarkable, brings with it a quiet unease: when the process of becoming is replaced by instant simulation, what happens to the integrity of the self?

For Padua, identity is not something one simply adopts—it is something built, shaped through time, practice, and experience. The sudden ease with which one can generate images or ideas, detached from the rigors of making, presents what the artist calls an “artificial identity.” It is an identity untethered from labor, from the gestures of the hand, from the long apprenticeship of thought and form.

In this suite of paintings, Padua explores this concern through a layered visual language. Human figures appear like masks or vessels, their forms animated by inner machinery—wheels, cogs, and circuits that suggest a hidden engine. Rather than tools we direct, these mechanisms seem to be directing us. In this inversion, the human becomes the surface, while technology moves behind and beneath, shaping the visible self.

Much of contemporary life now unfolds in virtual space—negotiated through screens, shaped in the cloud—and Padua voices a growing fear: that as we lean more heavily on technology, we risk eroding the texture of lived experience. Still, the artist resists a position of total rejection. Some of the technical motifs in these works were themselves generated through AI, yet it is through painting—through the physical act of reworking and reimagining them—that Padua reasserts authorship.

In doing so, he offers a path forward: one where AI is not a replacement for human insight, but a collaborator in the process of discovery. Used with intention, it can expand our ways of learning and seeing; left unchecked, it may supplant the very conditions that make identity meaningful.

For Padua, painting remains one of the few spaces where agency can still be exercised fully. It requires presence, reflection, and care. It affirms the artist’s hand, the artist’s voice. In a world where identities can now be generated in seconds, Artificial Identity (Ai) reminds us of the value of the slow, the studied, the real.