Faith Holland
Scribble Scrabble Slop
July 16 – August 22, 2026
Opening Thursday July 16, 6-8pm
Microscope is very pleased to present “Scribble Scrabble Slop,” as the second solo exhibition at the gallery by digital media artist Faith Holland.
For the new animated video, 3D sculptures, digital prints, and interactive wallpaper works on view in “Scribble Scrabble Slop,” Holland attempts to teach AI models to draw in the manner of a young toddler. To do so, the artist retrains them on a homemade data set she created containing scans of hundreds of actual early drawings — or “scribble scrabbles” — made by her child Hildegard Holland Watter (Hildy) between the ages of one and three.
Through the process, Holland’s’ works reveal scribbling as a blindspot of AI models, exposing intrinsic limitations, bias, and knowledge gaps of the technology to which we are increasingly surrendering control. The artworks on view also advocate for alternative training methods, akin to parenting, than those most commonly used, which the artist describes as “scraping the internet indiscriminately.” Holland notes AI models’ inability to, among others, distinguish between real and inauthentic sources; their insertion of unrelated and adult content in their results; and their creation and regurgitation of low quality AI-generated slop.
In “Green (Before the Word)” the artist engages ChatGPT in an 100-minute long conversation during which she shares scans of Hildy’s pictures and prompts it to create its own toddler-like “free-wheeling joyous drawings.” The screen recording of the exchange is accompanied by voiceovers by Holland, who narrates her own part, and an AI-generated impersonation of the company’s CEO Sam Altman in the role of the chatbot. Following numerous bloviated hallucinations about its own capabilities and humorous attempts at scribbling, ChatGPT eventually shares information about its programming that it blames for its failures.
Relatively more successful scribbles produced by image-to-image models, including Runway AI, that were trained on the databases of her child’s pictures provide the source imagery for the animated drawings we see superimposed over the chat text in the video, as well as for the other works on view.
The title of a second video “The Twenty Basic Scribbles” is borrowed from Rhoda Kellogg, the childhood scholar and researcher known for collecting and analyzing more than a million children’s drawings for their characteristics and complexities. The piece opens with a blank page onto which individual scribbles appear as if drawn by hand and gradually culminates into a single collaged composition. Various elements such as line quality and pressure and confusing textures, which do not resemble markers or crayons, clue us in to the digital sources of the work.
Holland says that during the AI training she realized that “even its best attempts have a lack of understanding of physical media.” As a response, she purposefully misinterprets the physical form of a child’s one-dimensional scribble in medium-sized, hanging 3D-printed sculptures from the series “Scribble Scrabbles.” In the series, which is a collaboration with her daughter Hildy, Holland isolates AI markings from the Runway AI images and runs them through multiple AI processes to transform them into three-dimensional objects. Each sculpture is then hand-colored with markers by Hildy in any manner of her choosing.
The large-scale, interactive vinyl wallpaper installation “Up to its Limits” asks viewers to add their own drawings to the empty white spaces of the work, which is otherwise covered in AI-generated scribbles. In this way, Holland allows us to visually witness the nuances, emotions, and intuition of the human mind and hand at work as directly compared to the algorithmic, probability-based simulations.
Faith Holland “Scribble Scrabble Slop” opens Thursday July 16 and continues through August 22, with an Opening Reception taking place on Thursday July 16, 6-8pm.
For further information please contact the gallery at inquiries@microscopegallery.com.
Please note our new address at: 527 W. 29th Street, 3rd Floor, New York, NY, which is directly next door to our former space.
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Faith Holland is an artist whose multimedia practice focuses on gender, intimacy, and technology. In works that exaggerate our physical and embodied relationships to technologies, Holland uses equal measures of humor and tenderness in sculpture, performance, video, animated gifs, and net art works. Her works have exhibited at institutions and galleries including The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Hole, New York, NY; TRANSFER, New York; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO; Human Resources Los Angeles (HRLA), Los Angeles, CA; NRW-Forum, Düsseldorf, Germany; Fotografisk Center, Copenhagen, Denmark; and DAM Gallery, Berlin, Germany, among many others.
Her work has been written about in Art in America, Artforum, Elephant, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, and The Observer, among many others. Grants include the New York State Council of the Arts (NYSCA), Harvestworks, and others. She received her BA in Media Studies from Vassar College and an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from School of the Visual Arts. Faith Holland lives and works in New York, NY.
