The eyes follow you. In Nettrice Gaskins' 2010 virtual exhibition Alternate Futures: Afrofuturist Multiverses & Beyond, a wall of eyeballs tracks the visitor's avatar through a simulated space. Elsewhere, a floor tile sends the avatar into a cage. The visitor can leave, but the interruption matters. Gaskins built surveillance and confinement into the apparently free terrain of a digital world. Even an invented future carries the structures of the present unless someone chooses to change them.
That early work offers a way into Gaskins' later images made with generative software. The Boston-based artist, teacher and writer has spent years asking who builds a technology, who receives access to it and what forms of imagination it permits. Her materials include three-dimensional virtual worlds, photographs, computer vision systems, artificial intelligence tools and the images produced by their recombination. The computer is neither a neutral assistant nor a magical author. It is a medium whose rules can be investigated, altered and placed under pressure.
The SFO Museum's exhibition of women Afrofuturists presents Gaskins' Afro-Surrealist Carnival series beside a 2021 self-portrait. In the former, text-to-image generation and neural style transfer are combined with Adobe Photoshop; the latter uses neural style transfer. The details of the tools matter because the images are not simply illustrations of a futuristic theme. They are records of choices about which source images, prompts, styles and corrections enter the process. Gaskins makes those choices as an artist with a history, not as a passive user waiting for a machine to surprise her.
A bridge between different futures
Before the recent explosion of generative image tools, Gaskins used another digital environment to make competing futures visible. In a 2016 interview with Caroline Picard, she describes constructing Alternate Futures inside the now-defunct IBM Exhibition Space in Second Life. The company sponsored and curated the exhibition, but Gaskins had virtual land and objects with which to build. She made water, air and sky part of the installation. At its centre she placed a long interplanetary bridge, adapted from an image that had interested her. On either side were installations organized around utopia and dystopia.
The bridge gives the work its clearest formal proposition. It asks the visitor to move rather than merely look. A conventional gallery may allow someone to stand back from a picture of an imagined society. Gaskins' virtual architecture makes a choice of route into part of the encounter. Utopia and dystopia are spatial possibilities, and the visitor's body is represented by an avatar that can cross toward either one. Movement becomes a kind of reading.
That reading grows less comfortable in the spaces themselves. The tracking eyes and cage tile are scripted responses to the visitor's actions. Their force depends on timing. A person can believe they are exploring freely until an ordinary step activates a system they did not see. Gaskins linked the experience to profiling and the sudden change from everyday movement to institutional control. The virtual cage cannot reproduce the stakes of actual incarceration, and it need not pretend to. Its role is to make the visitor notice a rule that had been invisible until the avatar crossed it.
The work also contains a sandbox associated with Octavia E. Butler's Earthseed, a place in which visitors could build an alternative reality. That is a different use of interactivity. The surveillance mechanism imposes a condition on the avatar; the sandbox opens a space to make something. Both are programmed. Both reveal that a digital world's apparent possibilities depend on whoever controls its design. In Gaskins' hands, the question of the future becomes less about a landscape's fantastic appearance than about its permissions.
Gaskins told Picard that she supplied visitors with virtual notecards they could read and keep in their inventories. The gesture is small, but it changes the exhibition's relationship to explanation. Information travels with the avatar after the moment of encounter. The work can be carried out of the installation as a saved object. A visitor does not have to understand every symbol while crossing the bridge; the notecard offers a way back into its ideas. It treats a virtual object as a portable part of an archive.
An image that asks who is remembered
In 2021, Gaskins made eleven portraits of “Featured Futurists” for the Smithsonian's FUTURES exhibition. Georgia Tech, where she studied digital media, describes the series as combining images of the subjects with the Deep Dream computer vision application. The subjects included people whose work had already opened possibilities in culture and thought. The portrait of Octavia E. Butler becomes particularly charged: an author whose fiction had tested social systems is represented through a system that transforms a photograph into new patterns.
Portraiture usually promises recognition. A likeness helps the viewer say, “There she is.” The Deep Dream transformations used in the Smithsonian series complicate that promise by altering the source image through a computer vision system. The result occupies a space between archival image and invented surface. Gaskins' intervention asks what it means to picture a futurist whose influence is already moving beyond the moment in which she was photographed. The answer does not come from the software alone. It comes from the selection of the subject, the source photograph and the artist's evaluation of what the altered image communicates.
The museum setting sharpens this question. A portrait in an exhibition about futures can risk making its subject into a monument. Gaskins' image process resists the stillness that a monument often imposes. It treats a photograph as material capable of further transformation. Yet it still depends on the person's name and achievements, which cannot be generated from visual texture. The artwork sits between the archive's duty to identify and Afrofuturism's invitation to imagine beyond inherited representations.
Gaskins' series also changes a common story about artificial intelligence in art. The familiar account starts with a machine that produces a strange image and asks whether it is creative. Her series starts with an artist and a set of people she wants viewers to see. Software enters as one operation within that larger project. A portrait is judged by its relation to its subject and audience, not by how convincingly it demonstrates the novelty of an algorithm.
The SFO Museum records that Gaskins' portraits of Greg Tate and Faith Ringgold were displayed as outdoor murals at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in Brooklyn. Scale and site change the image again. An image produced through digital processing leaves the screen and enters public space. A passerby does not need to know the name of the algorithm to see a Black cultural figure occupying a wall. The digital method is part of the work, but public visibility is part of its meaning.
Harriet Tubman and the question of navigation
Gaskins' Beacon of Hope, created for a Harriet Tubman bicentennial project, makes the relationship between history and computation more explicit. In conversation with Janell Hobson for Ms., she explains that she chose styles after considering the source photograph and Tubman's association with the North Star. She drew on an image of a cosmic quilt with elliptical forms and an archive of images with a bronze, metallic quality. Those ingredients entered the process through her memory, research and visual judgment before any resulting image could be assessed.
The title Beacon of Hope points toward navigation. A beacon is an aid to orientation rather than a guarantee of arrival. Gaskins' choices of star, cosmos and metallic surface move a historical image into a visual language of possible routes. Tubman remains a figure of historical action, while the portrait draws a relation between older methods of orientation and newer methods of constructing images. A viewer sees not only a remembered leader but an artist's decision to carry that memory into a different visual register.
In the same interview, Gaskins explains why the treatment of Black skin in an image matters to her. Photography and film technologies have often been calibrated in ways that poorly reproduce darker skin. She describes using current tools to bring out warmth, light and colour. This is an aesthetic decision with a technical history. A portrait's palette is not only a matter of taste; it is connected to systems that decide which faces appear legible and luminous. By adjusting those systems, an artist can intervene in a visual habit that otherwise seems natural.
This is also why Gaskins refuses the idea that an AI tool can be discussed only in terms of spectacle. She acknowledges concerns about computer vision, including its use in surveillance and racial profiling. The same broad family of technologies can serve very different purposes depending on who controls it and to what end. The eyes that followed an avatar in Alternate Futures remain a useful counterpoint to the light in Beacon of Hope. One work turns automated looking into a trap; the other turns image processing toward a portrait that the artist wants to make visible on her own terms.
The connection is not simple redemption. Making art with a tool does not erase the histories of its harmful use. Gaskins' practice is stronger because that tension stays in view. Her interview locates artistic experimentation alongside criticism of the systems from which the tools emerged. It leaves room for both a portrait's beauty and a question about the social uses of the software that made it possible.
A carnival made from more than one tool
The title Afro-Surrealist Carnival invites a different kind of looking. The SFO Museum's work label identifies the 2023 series as made with text-to-image generation, neural style transfer and Photoshop. These tools permit different kinds of intervention, from describing an image in words to transforming existing material and editing a result. Together they allow Gaskins to revise what an algorithm offers instead of accepting its first output.
“Carnival” also implies gathering and transformation. Costumes, exaggeration and public display allow an ordinary social order to be rearranged for a time. Gaskins has described embedding cultural background, art knowledge and personal experience into the prompts and tools she uses. That account gives the series a more particular center than software alone: an artist tests how inherited images of Black life can be expanded through deliberate acts of selection and revision. The series is therefore part of her wider argument for creative control within computational systems.
Her 2021 self-portrait, also presented by the museum, brings that process close to identity. A self-portrait is conventionally a place where an artist decides how to be seen. Neural style transfer adds a second vocabulary that can alter the surface of the face, but it does not remove the artist's agency in choosing the operation. The transformed likeness can hold a question: what happens when a person uses a system of classification and pattern to make an image of herself, rather than letting the system classify her from outside?
That question connects the self-portrait to the Second Life exhibition despite the difference in medium. In one, Gaskins scripts a space in which an avatar experiences being watched. In the other, she directs a system of image transformation toward her own likeness. Both works expose the terms under which a technology sees. Both insist that those terms can be made perceptible and contested.
The classroom as a place to build futures
Gaskins' teaching is not a separate, charitable appendix to her art. It is another place where the work's central question becomes practical: who gets to use the tools that picture the future? Her MIT Press book, Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation, published in 2021, argues for culturally relevant making with young people who have often been excluded from dominant accounts of technical invention. The publisher describes three modes in her approach: reappropriation, remixing and improvisation. Those words also describe much of her artistic method. An existing tool can be taken up for another purpose; a familiar image can be remixed; an unforeseen result can become the start of an improvised decision.
In the 2016 interview, Gaskins recalls a “Journey to Mars” workshop with students aged eleven to fifteen. Before designing a possible community on Mars, they identified positive and negative conditions in their actual home communities. They then drafted ideal communities and built three-dimensional models, including vehicles for travel. The exercise began with local knowledge rather than a ready-made fantasy of escape. Mars became a device for asking what a better place would require and what a young person might know about building one.
This sequence matters because it reverses a common hierarchy. Students do not have to leave their neighborhoods behind to be considered capable of thinking about space travel. Their knowledge of home becomes the material from which a new environment is designed. A model of Mars can contain concerns about housing, transport, safety and collective life learned on Earth. The speculative project gives those concerns another scale without making them disappear.
Gaskins also tells Picard about a student who used David Bowie's music and electronic sound sensors to make LEDs respond to sound. The student moved from shyness to explaining her project before an audience. The detail illustrates a form of learning that cannot be reduced to acquiring a software command. Music, electronics and performance met in one object, and the student's confidence changed through making it. In Gaskins' practice, technological literacy includes the ability to connect a tool to one's own cultural interests and then explain the result.
The teaching gives a social answer to the question posed by the digital artworks. A virtual world can simulate agency, but the classroom can place actual tools in young people's hands. The students' models do not solve the inequities they identify at home. They do allow young people to rehearse a role as designers of conditions rather than passive recipients of them. That is a modest but concrete version of a future being made.
The hand inside the system
Gaskins' work is often discussed amid large claims about what artificial intelligence will do to art. Her projects ask a more precise set of questions. Who selected the face? What image history shaped the portrait? Which algorithm altered it? Who judged the result? Where did the finished image appear? What did a visitor or student get to do with it? Each question places a human decision and a social setting back into an account that can otherwise become absorbed by the machine's apparent powers.
The answers differ from work to work. Alternate Futures makes a visitor experience rules built into a virtual environment. The Smithsonian portraits and Beacon of Hope transform archival and historical subjects into images oriented toward future memory. Afro-Surrealist Carnival uses several computational and editing tools to build a series around the artist's culturally informed decisions. The classroom projects put prototyping in the hands of students. None of these forms is reducible to a single visual signature. Their relation lies in the design of possibility and constraint.
There is a useful echo in Krull's Futuristic Dreams, which uses styling and interviews with people connected to the Democratic Republic of Congo to ask what another present or future could look like. Gaskins works with different places and tools, but both pieces take visual futurity beyond a fascination with shiny surfaces. They ask who controls the conditions from which a future can be imagined.
The bridge in Alternate Futures remains the sharpest image of Gaskins' practice. It stretches between spaces that appear to offer different outcomes, but the visitor must still notice the code beneath the route. A future can be drawn, entered, revised or blocked. Gaskins makes art at that point of contact between imagination and the structures that decide how far it may travel.