Reilly Donovan

I make digital artworks that examine how emerging technologies reshape perception, belief, and the boundaries of the self. My work spans interactive installation, virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and mobile and web-based experience — but the medium is never the point. Each piece is built inside the technology it interrogates, using the machinery of simulation and machine intelligence to ask what these systems are doing to us while we're busy using them.

My current investigations center on artificial intelligence — not as a tool for making images, but as a subject demanding examination. AI is the first technology that reflects us back to ourselves: trained on our language, our images, our beliefs, it returns a distorted mirror of collective humanity. I'm interested in what happens in that reflection — how we project meaning, agency, and even divinity onto systems we've built but don't fully understand, and how our participation with these systems, direct and indirect, is quietly authoring the future we'll inhabit. Whether that takes the form of a machine generating its own religion, an autonomous entity performing itself in real time, or a neural network dreaming through the residue of human perception, the question underneath is the same: as our instruments grow more powerful, who is defining what we see — and who is being defined?

I began this inquiry in spatial computing, working with mixed reality when the hardware was still a frontier — placing simulated content into physical space and watching people negotiate the seam between the two. That seam has only widened. The camera changed painting; extended reality and machine intelligence are changing what we experience as real. My work lives in that changing territory — not to celebrate the technology or condemn it, but to hold it still long enough to actually look at it.

Reilly Donovan (b. 1984, Seattle, WA) is a new media artist making digital artworks that span interactive installation, virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and mobile and web-based experience. His practice treats emerging technologies not as tools but as subjects — each work built inside the medium it interrogates, using the machinery of simulation, perception, and machine intelligence to examine how these systems reshape what we sense, believe, and become.

Donovan’s recent work centers on artificial intelligence as both material and question: what AI is, how humans project meaning onto it, and how our participation with these systems — direct and indirect — is quietly authoring our collective future. In The Word of the Future (Museum of Museums, Seattle, 2021), a collaboration with artist Jacob Fennell, modified neural networks generated an evolving machine-made religion — sermons, liturgical music, and shape-shifting stained glass — examining how humanity’s faith in technology mirrors the meaning-making structures of belief itself. The Seattle Times described the work as machines “not only building a new religion, but learning how to build a religion.”

Donovan has exhibited nationally and internationally since 2015, including Design Basel (Switzerland), Currents International New Media Festival (Santa Fe), Seattle Art Fair, and the Seattle Art Museum. His collaborations with sculptor John Grade produced mixed reality installations at the Mystic Seaport Museum (Connecticut) and the Anchorage Museum (Alaska), merging physical sculpture with responsive digital environments. He has held artist residencies at Pilchuck Glass School (2018) and the Museum of Glass, Tacoma (2019), where he explored the intersection of glass and mixed reality — placing one of humanity’s oldest optical technologies in conversation with its newest.

Across installations, headsets, browsers, and neural networks, Donovan’s work asks a consistent question: as our instruments for perceiving reality grow more powerful, who — or what — is defining what we see?