Visual art / Q1 Close, by Litia Roko. At Platform, Manuka, until December 14. Reviewed by SOPHIA HALLOWAY.

Q1 Close, an exhibition by emerging artist Litia Roko, marks the end of the first quarter of the 21^st century.

Roko reflects on the trajectory of the internet over the past 25 years, from turn-of-the-century optimism for the internet’s utopian potential, to our current day understanding of the ways that the internet and subsequent digital technologies perpetuate inequalities. With a particular critical focus on artificial intelligence, Roko examines the politics of technology and the status of art within this system.

The exhibition is comprised of a single, site-specific installation that responds to a 2025 advertisement for Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses featuring celebrities Chris Pratt, Chris Hemsworth and Kris Jenner.

In a pastiche of art-world types, the ad shows Pratt clad in a black turtleneck and black, thick-rimmed AI glasses, contemplating various works in a gallery. He asks Meta for an interpretation of Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, a work comprised of a fresh banana duct taped to the wall. The AI assistant informs Pratt that the work is worth $US6.2 million. Hemsworth eats the banana, prompting Jenner to ask: “Who eats art?”

Roko’s answer to this question is Meta, which consumes vast quantities of data (and environmental resources) to create its AI systems. To train the AI glasses, Meta commissioned a dataset called Ego4D, which collected first-person footage from 923 participants across the world, recording every moment of their daily lives. In four videos throughout the gallery, Roko has selected footage from this dataset that shows participants creating art, overlaid with Jenner’s disembodied command: “Hey Meta, who eats art?”

An enlarged print of an Excel spreadsheet takes up much of the rear wall and floor, listing every single exhibition that has taken place at Platform since 2000 – another kind of dataset. It is a nostalgic compendium of familiar names, of artists and curators who are, or were at one time, Canberra based and started out at Platform (formerly Canberra Contemporary Art Space Manuka).

The room is punctuated with office partitions, aptly sourced via Facebook Marketplace from the office of an AI specialist, and the edges of the white cube are outlined in green paint, like a bounding box used in computer vision to define a region or object of interest in an image.

Roko’s work is exceptionally researched, impeccably timed and humorously subversive. Artists have long drawn on the history of art to create new works, a process that AI attempts to replicate at an exorbitant scale. Notions of value and authenticity are longstanding questions in art history, made increasingly complex with the accelerating rates of mechanical reproduction enabled by AI technology.

Roko likens the myth of the genius of the artist with similar genius myths assigned to tech billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg. In its ad, Meta questions the legitimacy of the value of art with seemingly little self-awareness of the tech industry’s own blatant commercialisation and arbitrary notions of value.

The site-specific nature of Roko’s installation makes the political personal – this is not just happening in the far-off worlds of Silicon Valley billionaires. The insatiable machine consumes us all.

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