Tech Tips

A live performance-installation in which a nail artist and an AI system attempt the same design in real time by Arabelle Sicardi

Tech Tips stages a direct confrontation between human creative labor and machine mimicry inside a speculative nail salon, foregrounding the failures of AI to understand, replicate, or replace embodied human skill.

Guided by audience prompts, a professional nail artist creates a press-on nail set in real time while Adobe Firefly generates the same design algorithmically — and a live dashboard tracks the energy, water, carbon, and dollar cost of each AI generation as it happens, making visible the hidden infrastructure behind tools marketed as effortless and free. Audience members can donate via Zeffy to offset the AI's resource use, with all proceeds going to the Museum of Nails Foundation development fund regardless of whether the artist chooses to respond to any prompt — because the donation is not about the output, it's about the labor and the cost. Filmed segments weave together nail art history, oral histories from nail technicians, and critical discourse on AI's environmental footprint and its relationship to beauty labor — centering the knowledge, lineage, and irreplaceable skill that no model trained on image data can transmit.

Tech Tips by CultureHub Resident Artist Arabelle Sicardi is a rigorous argument for human capacity: that craft, care, cultural transmission, and the relationship between maker and made cannot be approximated by systems that have learned the surface of a tradition without ever holding a brush.

This project is supported within the CultureHub Residency program.

CREDITS
Artist and concept – Arabelle Sicardi Supported by – Museum of Nails Foundation
Nail Artist Collaborator – Gabie Macedo
Dashboard Coding – Arabelle Sicardi
Dashboard Operator – Melissa Munnerlyn

Photo courtesy of We-Designs