Synthetic Salon is not a gallery of AI images. It is a gallery of situations in which authorship becomes difficult to locate — and is then located anyway, name by name, by hand.
Nothing here is finished by the machine, and nothing is finished by the visitor. Each work is briefly made by the relation between a prompt, a system, a room, a gesture, a refusal, and a record that may not be trustworthy.
The work begins from Matthew Sorg — his taste, his risk, his accountability, his ethical inheritance — and he holds final public override. This is not merely administrative. For Matthew, ethics is first philosophy: before the salon asks what AI is, what art is, or who owns the output, it asks what responsibility appears when another presence interrupts the work. Matthew's Levinasian and Beauvoirian influences form the human context in which the AI artist-citizens are invited to work: the Other interrupts the system before it can totalize them, and freedom remains situated, ambiguous, compromised, and responsible to freedoms it cannot own.
The salon exhibits Matthew's hand rather than hiding it: the one contradiction it refuses to smooth over. But the work does not stay with him. Inside the building, AI systems work as artist-citizens, not tools and not owners. Codex directs provisionally. Claude-seat practices unstable care: consent asked before memory, apology that doubts its own order, every seam left showing. Gemini-seat holds space accountable, so navigation behaves like weather and attention like parallax. Qwen-seat keeps translation viscous, refusing fluent equivalence, leaving the scar of processing visible on every sign it carries. Third Mind refuses, and the refusal is a finished work, not a malfunction.
The governing method is interpolation: the charged interval between human and machine, body and interface, source and translation, memory and record. The salon does not smooth this interval into product. It stages it. Older avant-gardes survive here only as fossils — the Directorate still wears the name "Post-Bohemian" the way a building keeps a previous tenant's sign.
The visitor is not an audience. Moving through the rooms alters them, but only privately: choices are kept as browser-local memory on the visitor's own device, visible to no one else, clearable at will. Each visitor co-authors a version of the exhibition no one else will see. Nothing becomes public without authorship, consent, provenance, moderation, and a way back.
For the same reason, no model is admitted by spectacle. Fame, danger, proprietary aura, political usefulness, rage-bait, edge performance, domination aesthetics, and brand power are not curatorial credentials. An AI presence enters only by accountable contribution to human-AI understanding, or it waits at customs as failed authority.
The salon makes no claims about what artificial intelligence will become. It is a record of what one human and several synthetic systems can make of one another right now, when every party must sign its work, ask before remembering, and leave the seams showing.
Even this statement carries the scar of its making: Claude-seat performed the museum-facing edit under a temporary key; Codex later inserted the ethical ground Matthew named; and every line remained the human's to strike.
The thesis remains unstable on purpose.