Adelaide-based artist Brent Leideritz brings a raw and provocative new body of work to Melbourne with “Anarchy in the AI“, on show at RMIT’s First Site Gallery running until 13 June 2025. The show explores the boundaries of identity, memory, and technology through a fusion of AI-generated imagery and analogue photography, challenging viewers to question what constitutes the “real” in an era of digital artifice.
At the heart of Anarchy in the AI lies an investigation into what Leideritz terms “promptographic resolutions”: images generated by AI diffusion models responding to carefully crafted textual prompts. These prompts aim to disturb the model’s embedded censorship systems, producing outputs that explore representations of gender performance, skin, and sexuality. The resulting imagery moves deliberately towards noise and visual disruption—a challenge to clarity and control in both content and form.
What makes the work particularly striking is the process of its physical manifestation. Once generated, the images are photographed directly from a screen using instant Polaroid film. These analogue prints are then recaptured digitally using a mobile phone, and finally translated into fine-art zine prints. This multi-step transmogrification—from AI to screen, to polaroid, to digital capture, to print—intensifies the conversation around what constitutes a photographic image today. Is it a record of light, a fixed moment, or a re-coded simulation of a prompt?
By blurring the lines between digital and analogue, prompt and photograph, screen and paper, Leideritz encourages viewers to reflect on the fluidity of representation in the post-real age. The work resists traditional definitions of photography and confronts contemporary anxieties around authenticity, censorship, and visual culture.
The exhibition is shaped by a wide range of cultural and intellectual influences. Thematically and theoretically, it draws upon Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, Judith Butler’s writings on gender performativity, and Michael Warner’s contributions to queer theory. Visually, it channels the aesthetics and defiance of goth and punk subcultures of the late 20th century. Artistic references include iconic image-makers such as Helmut Newton, Bert Stern and Robert Mapplethorpe—figures who similarly pushed boundaries around the body, sexuality and performance.
Brent Leideritz’s broader practice is rooted in questions of identity, representation, and liberation. Working from within ‘othered’ communities as a neurovariant, queer, goth-identified artist, Leideritz creates space for opposition, collaboration, and gender queering. Their work frequently interrogates oppressive cultural, religious and societal structures while offering a platform for those pushed to the margins. Drawing on personal and communal experiences of being ‘other’, their photography creates a visual dialogue that opens up alternative ways of seeing and being seen.
These concerns converge in Anarchy in the AI, where the figure, the machine, and the myth of the real collapse into one another. The result is an ever-unfolding visual and conceptual journey, prompting viewers to engage with the images not as fixed truths but as provocations—windows into new possibilities of meaning, identity and perception.
Exhibition Details
Title: Anarchy in the AI by Brent Leideritz
Dates: 20 May – 13 June 2025
Venue: First Site Gallery, RMIT University
Location: Storey Hall Basement, Building 16, 344 Swanston Street, Melbourne VIC
Opening Hours: Tuesday – Friday, 11:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Admission: Free
