Artificial Abundance

Artificial Abundance is an solo exhibition of new work by media artist Roopa Vasudevan, which contrasts the escalating hype surrounding artificial intelligence with the realities of its implementation. Through a series of mixed-media artworks spanning digital and analog prints, stained glass, code-based animation, and interactive systems, the artist unpacks the requisite assumptions of limitlessness and omnipotence inherent to our current conceptions of AI—which stand in direct contrast to the finite, tangible resources necessary to support it.

Eschewing controversial large language models (LLMs) and image generation software in favor of more mundane, everyday instantiations and representations of AI technology, Vasudevan attempts to surface the metaphors, anthropomorphism, and fears that have both driven the development of these tools, and which also inform our understanding of their future roles in society. By pointing to constructed ideals concerning what AI is (and is not), Vasudevan asks what we are implying about the more ineffable qualities of life, learning, and humanity—the things that cannot be encoded into 0s and 1s—when we are faced with the rush to classify, quantify, and automate our existence into infinity.

The exhibition and the artist’s residency at SPACE will coincide with the release of a limited-run artist’s book, featuring new writing by Vasudevan alongside versions of the artwork specifically designed to be viewed in a print format.

Artificial Abundance is generously supported by the Emerson Collective Culture Council and the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at UMass Amherst.

Roopa Vasudevan is a South Asian-American media artist, computer programmer, and researcher based between New York City and Western Massachusetts. Her research and creative practice investigate default technical practices and protocols, and how they intersect with larger social and economic power structures.

Vasudevan has exhibited her work internationally, and been featured by the New York Times, WHYY, Reuters, Slate, Hyperallergic, Jezebel, PBS NewsHour, Public Radio International, and more. She has demonstrated a steadfast commitment to artist-led and DIY organizations throughout her career, and her work has been exhibited at and supported by such spaces as Flux Factory (Queens); SOHO20 Gallery (Brooklyn); SPACES (Cleveland); ABC No Rio (New York); AUTOMAT (Philadelphia); Public Works Administration (New York); Unrequited Leisure (Nashville); Space 1026 (Philadelphia); Icebox Project Space (Philadelphia); Dunkunsthalle (New York); Gallery 263 (Cambridge); Project for Empty Space (Newark); and Vox Populi (Philadelphia), where she was a member of the artist collective between 2019 and 2023. She has additionally been supported by NEW INC (New Museum), the Processing Foundation, Eyebeam, and the Emerson Collective Culture Council, among others. Between 2022 and 2025, she was a co-investigator on the Data Fluencies Project, an international research initiative based out of the Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver) and funded by the Mellon Foundation, through which she organized three concurrent exhibitions that took place in 2025 at Boston Cyberarts (Boston, MA, USA), Or Gallery (Vancouver, BC, Canada), and the Living Arts and Science Center (Lexington, KY, USA).

Vasudevan received a PhD in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania in 2023, and an MPS from the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU in 2013. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is a proud member of the Massachusetts Society of Professors (MSP), the labor union representing faculty and librarians.