“Artificial Abundance” is an artist's book by media artist and researcher Roopa Vasudevan that contemplates what it means to even speak about computation as though it is capable of replicating human life in the first place.

Bridging deeply personal memories with scholarly meditations on artificial intelligence—and its relationships with the things that foundationally define the experience of being human—Vasudevan unpacks the assumptions inherent to cultural conceptions of AI, and suggests that the things that are often elided in the false equivalence between computational and human sensemaking are the things that may matter the most. What do we leave behind in our rush to classify and quantify our existences, and to reduce the totality of our lives into what can be encoded into 0s and 1s?

Woven throughout the text are images that Vasudevan created by manipulating photography from her personal archive with machine learning tools that have been available in standard consumer design software for over a decade. The deliberate refusal to use LLMs and image generation software, in favor of tools that have long been integrated into our lives, points to the perpetual novelty of AI in the cultural imagination—and the ways in which our fears of what is to come lead us to gloss over what is happening in the present.

80-page wire-bound risograph book with a die cut cover; interior is printed in neon coral, light lime, and federal blue. Written and designed by Roopa Vasudevan. Printed and bound by Risolve Studio (Lancaster, PA). Edition of 100.