Learning to disappear in the age of AI
Words by Mario Rodriguez
How to Disappear, 2026. Video still. Courtesy of David Castillo Gallery.
In Jillian Mayer’s statement for “Placeholder Future,” her latest solo exhibition at David Castillo Gallery, she concedes to a certain failure to predict technologies, questioning the reach of predictive speculation and its inherent hopefulness for betterment.
What is certain in this prescriptive illustration of a future yet to come is humanity’s need to adapt to waves of technological change. Combining video art and reconstructed defunct satellite equipment from a technology company in decline with her quintessential biomorphic sculptural style, Mayer communicates her own sense of satiric hopefulness as many grapple with everything that will die (including maybe humanity?) with the advent of AI.
“How to Disappear,” a satiric instructional video on view in the back left corner of the gallery, is the cornerstone of this exhibition, in part because it communicates (both literally and figuratively) the mission of “Placeholder Future,” and because snippets from the full video reverberate on several different screens throughout the gallery floor. In the video, Mayer takes on the role of a YouTube instructor, walking someone through the steps on how to avoid being pinned down by technologies. Walking with different gaits to throw off camera footage, getting under the table, plastic surgery without documentation and avoiding social gatherings at all costs are some examples of hacks Mayer purports to be useful in avoiding the technological panopticon. The video is weird. Weird like the people who think 5G is going to give them cancer unless you put tinfoil around your head. Weird like the guy you know who goes to Burning Man without an RV and wears copper anklets. Unfortunately, the video is also right; you’d probably have to do all these wackadoo actions to really be free from the structural tech takeover in which most people find themselves.
The exhibition’s scrappy defiance is borne out of its humor and the reimagination of technological waste. Mayer calls back to El Período Especial, an epoch in Cuban history of which many Miamians are familiar because of the way Cubans starved and went without several necessities after the collapse of the USSR. Much like Mayer does in her sculptures, Cubans then and now have to rig and resolve with what’s available; there is no option to “just buy a new one.”
“Placeholder Future” sculptures seem to launch out of the ground, slouch, slant like some sort of plastic mangrove proliferating through the gallery. None of the satellite equipment lives out the purpose for which it was made any longer and now takes on a sort of new, organic, sedentary life as contemporary sculpture. The work harkens to a gentrification already in motion, the reappropriation of the old and the used. From vintage stores to $500 phones designed to function like an old flip phone, to several cultural and trend influencers talking about how “the analog” is in, people are reacting to the rampant pace of tech futures by paying a premium to emulate what others do out of necessity.