Contestants for a Pageant That No Longer Exists (2026)
Contestants for a Pageant That No Longer Exists feeds Micah Alhadeff's existing aesthetic into AI, expanding a visual language built on fantasy, excess, and glitch into territory that couldn't have existed before. The project combines emerging AI tools with 3D animation, TouchDesigner, glitch distortion, and analog video synthesis, allowing the characters to move through multiple stages of translation, mutation, and transformation.
The collection features eight interactive characters, each developed as a study in excess. Their bodies are built from sequins and spikes, polka dots and plissé, chrome hearts and citrus. Drawing from club-kid culture, Baroque and Rococo ornamentation, aliens, Harajuku fashion, deities, and doll-like fantasy, each character embodies a different kind of exaggerated glamour. They are strange, ornamental, artificial, and theatrical, part fashion object, part digital sculpture, and part impossible performer.
The models were created using AI systems trained on Alhadeff’s previous artwork, allowing the collection to emerge from a collision between existing visual language and new generative possibilities. The process moved through multiple stages of translation: from previous artwork into AI-generated images, from images into 3D models, and from 3D models into a glitch-fashion short made with TouchDesigner and analog video synthesis. The end result fuses vintage, contemporary, and emerging technologies into one work.
The significance of the project lies in the fact that these emerging tools are now at the cusp of being able to translate highly specific visual ideas with real accuracy. For Alhadeff, AI is not replacing the act of making, but opening a new space where references, obsessions, and existing artwork can mutate into forms that might not have emerged otherwise. The collection uses this moment in technology to imagine new kinds of characters and digital objects, ones that feel connected to Alhadeff’s past work while pointing toward a stranger and more expansive future.
