Robert Hodgin
Robert Hodgin is a Brooklyn-based artist and co-founder/Head of R&D at Rare Volume, with a background spanning the Barbarian Group, Bloom Studio’s Planetary iPad app (acquired by Smithsonian), and co-creation of the Cinder C++ framework. A RISD Sculpture graduate, his work explores data visualization, immersive simulations, theoretical physics, collective animal behaviors, and audio visualizations, currently focusing on Houdini.
Why Bother? Making Art in the Age of AI
A couple years ago, I had spent weeks building a generative system. I tweaked constraints, obsessed over tiny details, and passed the time during long renders. Then I asked an AI to try something similar. It gave me results in just a few seconds. And they were… good. Good enough to make me pause, and to leave me asking a question I never thought I would: Why bother?
This talk is about that moment, about what happens when the work we’ve built our lives around is suddenly effortless, endless, and automated. It’s not a rejection of the creative potential for AI. It’s an attempt to understand where our creative value lives when machines can generate anything instantly.
I’ll walk through a few of my own projects: simulations, generative experiments, and digital environments. They weren’t easy. But that’s exactly why they mattered. And I’ll argue that the meaning of our work isn’t in the output anymore. It’s in the process, the problem-solving, and the moments of doubt and discovery. That’s the part AI can’t do. That’s the part that still matters. Because maybe the struggle is the art.
