Art Requires a Heartbeat

*Art Has a Heartbeat* is a collaborative exhibition exploring the evolving relationship between human creativity and artificial intelligence through visual art, poetry, and prompt-based experimentation. Created by visual artist McKenzie Bergenback and poet Sarah Vance, the show began with a simple question: what happens when the same prompt is interpreted by a human hand, a human heart, and a machine?

Using shared prompts as a starting point, Bergenback and Vance each created original works — visual and written — while simultaneously feeding those same prompts into various AI software platforms. The resulting pieces were displayed in conversation with one another, revealing not only differences in style and execution, but deeper distinctions in intuition, memory, embodiment, emotion, and lived experience.

Rather than positioning AI as either villain or replacement, the exhibition invited viewers into a more nuanced dialogue about creativity itself: What makes art feel alive? Can a machine replicate meaning, or only mimic pattern? Where does authorship begin? And what, exactly, gives art its heartbeat?

At its core, *Art Has a Heartbeat* argues that while artificial intelligence can generate endless images and language, true art requires something more difficult to replicate — consciousness, vulnerability, longing, grief, memory, relationship, and the invisible imprint of a life fully lived. The exhibition becomes less about technology itself and more about what it reveals about being human.