Prompted Dramas, 2023-2025

Prompted Dramas

Context-specific, single-channel video series incorporating ChatGPT, 2023-2025.

Overall Description

Prompted Dramas is a series three videos (Through the Gallery, Shattered Reflections, and The Exhibit You Can’t Touch) in which Berdugo asks generative AI to write short plays about the art world — and then stages the results, complete with their flaws, as videos performed by animated cats, a nod to cats as the original memes of the internet. Each drama is set inside an art institution: a campus gallery where a painting faces removal, a college museum gutted by corporate acquisition, an online exhibition that absorbs its own viewers.

The scripts were generated by ChatGPT across the chatbot's rapid evolution from 2023 to 2025, and they reveal a chatbot's idea of art: its biases about education, race, privilege, and technology; its compulsion toward tidy compromise; and, over time, its increasingly relentless eagerness to help. Rather than concealing the machine's involvement, the work makes it the subject — the chat interactions with ChatGPT play transparently on screen, exposing the process of generation. Behind each video lies still more invisible labor: the many, many prompts Berdugo iterated through before arriving at a usable script. Taken together, the videos form an inadvertent self-portrait of the chatbot: a dramaturg that is eager, conflict-averse, and fluent in the internet's accumulated clichés about art and the institutions that house it.

Through the Gallery, single-channel video, runtime 09:08, 2023

Through the Gallery is a single-channel video incorporating ChatGPT, made specifically for an exhibition at the Thacher Gallery at the University of San Francisco. The video stages a short musical drama, written by AI and performed by animated cats — a nod to cats as the original memes of the internet. In it, two students wander through a campus art gallery they've always treated as a mere passageway, until a professor reveals that its artworks are made by their own peers. When word arrives that the Dean's office wants a painting removed for being "inappropriate and offensive," the professor mounts a defense of artistic freedom — culminating in dueling musical numbers in which the professor sings an anthem to free expression and the Dean laments the burdens of keeping the peace. The conflict resolves, as AI-generated drama tends to, in tidy compromise: the painting stays up, with a disclaimer.

The video makes its own AI use its subject: the chat interaction with ChatGPT plays transparently in the background, exposing the process of generation. Arriving at a usable script was anything but automatic — Berdugo iterated through many, many prompts before ChatGPT, the generative AI chatbot released in December 2022, produced this story. Berdugo commissioned a gig actor named "ngwangrenus" from Fiverr.com to produce one of the songs using lyrics written by ChatGPT, and the background music is AI generated using the music production platform AIVA.

Exhibitions + Screenings

“If I’d Known Then,” Thacher Gallery, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA. 2023.
“VIDEOMEDEJA: 27th Annual New Media Art Festival,” KS Svilara, Novi Sad, Serbia. 2023.

Press

Collected Press Clippings from Videomedeja 2023 (in Serbian), as well as its program.

Shattered Reflections, single-channel video, runtime 10:04, 2023

Shattered Reflections is a single-channel video made specifically for an exhibition at the Mills College Art Museum. The video stages a short drama, written by AI and performed by animated cats. Though it never says so directly, the plot is about Mills College itself, which was acquired by Northeastern University shortly before Berdugo was an artist-in-residence there — a period when the college was undergoing massive change: the closing of its Art MFA program, beautiful art studios shuttered and repurposed for gaming nights. In the video's thinly veiled version of these events, an artist-in-residence grapples with an acquisition by a corporate university whose new administration plans to gut the campus museum and convert it into a "state-of-the-art technology center." The artist and curator mount a defense of the collection through dueling musical numbers — and, unlike most AI-generated drama, the story refuses a tidy resolution: the museum empties, and the women are left facing an uncertain future.

The script and song lyrics were generated by ChatGPT, the generative AI chatbot released in December 2022, and lay bare the model's assumptions about art and institutional power — assumptions the video's own unresolved ending quietly refuses. Berdugo commissioned a gig actor from the platform sharing site Fiverr.com to produce one of the songs using lyrics written by ChatGPT.

Exhibitions

“Art+Process+Ideas: Liat Berdugo, Heesoo Kwon, Ranu Mukherjee,” Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA. Sep 19 - Dec 3, 2023.

Press

Alexander Ullman, “In Mills College Art Museum Show, Technology Becomes an Active Collaborator,” KQED ARTS, Nov 7, 2023.

*Shattered Reflections* installed at Mills College Art Museum, 2023.

The Exhibit You Can’t Touch, single-channel video, runtime 03:40, 2025

The Exhibit You Can't Touch is a single-channel video made for "About Not By For Not From," a pavilion in the 7th edition of The Wrong Biennale — one of the world's largest digital art biennials, held entirely online. The video stages a short drama, written by AI and performed by animated cats — a nod to cats as the original memes of the internet — about online exhibitions themselves: a fitting subject for a work shown only online. In it, an artist named Riley browses a virtual exhibition called "The Museum Without Walls," guided by a synthetic CuratorBot through galleries with titles like “The Infinite Scroll” and is heckled by an anonymous commenter. The drama turns when the exhibit asks for access to Riley's microphone: their voice is absorbed into the artwork, and the viewer becomes the viewed. The script culminates with the artwork itself coming alive — whispering to Riley in glitching, poetic fragments: "You came to see me. Now you see yourself."

The script was generated by ChatGPT in 2025 — by then a far more eager collaborator than the version Berdugo used in earlier works, unprompted in its offers to turn the play into a musical, to generate MIDI files, and to ask follow-up questions. The chat interaction with ChatGPT plays transparently on screen, preserving these solicitations and making the chatbot's relentless helpfulness part of the work's subject. The video's background music is AI generated.