Shelf Life: Addie Wagenknecht

Shelf Life examines longevity culture and its belief that protocols, pills and systems can control the one thing that defines being alive. Bryan Johnson’s Don’t Die sells it as product and protocol, a refusal of death run from a dashboard with no room for an ending. Wagenknecht took his protocol, Blueprint, and applied it to bouquets of roses.

Pointed at three bouquets, the AI does not register the flowers’ aging or their decay. Death is a state AI has no category for so it stops finding the flowers and goes on confidently seeing a vase. On the final podium the AI has worked through the whole Blueprint protocol down to the last item: don’t die. The roses never left the vase, yet what dies is never observed as gone. It simply ceases to be seen by the machine and by the culture that built them. A bouquet is one of the oldest symbols of mortality, and here the memento mori is a line item missing from the protocol.

We are teaching machines to be human while sparing them the one condition of being human. The wish to defeat death and the failure to notice it come out of the same system, in the same room.

The exhibition takes place on the occasion of Wagenknecht's Believe me (2017), a commission for the Whitney Museum of American Art's artport, being shown in artport: A History of Internet Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art (21 November 2026 – 28 March 2027), a milestone survey marking twenty-five years of the Whitney's online commissions for net art.