LaJuné McMillian's AI keeper runs on collected prayers
An Unreal Engine avatar of the artist's future self opens at bitforms on Oct. 29, speaking through a local model no cloud can touch.
- When
- Thu., Oct. 29, 2026 through Sat., Jan. 9, 2027. Opening reception Thu., Oct. 29, 6 to 8 p.m.
- Where
- bitforms, New York.
The Portal's Keeper is an avatar of LaJuné McMillian's future self, modeled in Unreal Engine and animated by a language model that lives entirely inside the gallery. Starting Thursday, Oct. 29, you can go talk to them: To See for Oneself, the artist's new solo show at bitforms in New York, opens with a reception from 6 to 8 PM and runs through Jan. 9, 2027.
An excerpt from the preview of The Portal’s Keeper, McMillian’s Urban Video Project commission with Manuel Molina Martagon. The full preview, with sound, is on Vimeo
The model was built from McMillian's own prayers and essays, plus more than 1,300 prayers that visitors left at their Frist Art Museum exhibition in 2024, and it runs with no cloud connection and no remote access, so every conversation stays in the room where it happened. McMillian calls this "(re)generative AI," intelligence rooted in reciprocity rather than extraction, and pairs the machine with a living hydroponic sculpture that grows alongside it. The show's title translates the Ancient Greek autopsia, to see for oneself, recasting the autopsy as an act of witnessing rather than dissection.
McMillian has been in these pages before: we spoke with them about the Black Movement Library and motion witnessing, the practice of capturing Black movement without extracting it.
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