Curated and presented by Somerset House on London’s Strand, ‘Cute’ was a major exhibition exploring the complex power of cuteness in contemporary culture. Bringing together contemporary artworks, music, fashion, toys, video games and social media, it revealed the complexity and potential of all things adorable, doe-eyed and chubby-cheeked.
At the heart of the commission, which included the exhibition identity, marketing, graphics and catalogue, was ‘Playing Dress Up with AI’, an installation featuring 17 AI-generated cats that lined the exhibition entrance. Drawing on the online trend of sharing pictures of dressed-up pets, GTF developed a family of otherworldly images that exploited the oddly charming qualities emerging from the early days of text-to-image generative AI. The recurring appearance of unprompted traits such as soft textures, diffused lighting and additional limbs revealed AI’s limitations, which, combined with its extraordinary capacity to interpret, produced images that were equally fantastical and unsettling.
Even during development, the technology was evolving: software updates during the commission period generated results with new aesthetics and increasingly photorealistic qualities. The images created for ‘Playing Dress Up with AI’ became appropriately of-a-moment, reflecting the ephemeral nature of cuteness itself.
Futura Maxi, a suitably oversized, wide-eyed typeface, was used throughout the exhibition and catalogue. Interpretive texts were presented on wall-mounted and free-standing panels that were equally chubby in form. Round-cornered frames were vacuum-formed and inset with flat panels reminiscent of toy packaging, with all elements flocked in a Sylvanian Families-inspired palette of soft, mousey greys.
