Transcendent Contact: Expanding Creative Agency Through Hallucination

Transcendent Contact is the catalogue of an exhibition that never took place, produced through an iterative human-AI curatorial process in which confabulation, interpretation, and authorship continuously reshape one another. Structured around the palindromic title SAW/WAS, the catalogue first presents AI-generated artworks as real museum holdings, then reveals the exhibition's fictional status and traces the history of human and AI hallucination. By re-framing hallucination as a positive capacity, we derive nine potentials of AI hallucination from the process, each beginning with `Hallucination Can Offer.' The project treats agency as a relational condition that circulates among creator, tool, curator, and audience rather than splitting cleanly between human and AI. This condition shifts again as readers encounter, and later re-read, the catalogue. We argue that the unverified can function as a form of reality, and that hallucination, understood as capacity rather than an error, expands the conditions under which creative agency is exercised.