My Guggenheim Fellowship essay

At the last possible minute, I decided to apply for a Guggenheim Fellowship to support my American Nukes project. It was a scramble to get it done in time, and I only just made it. The Guggenheim is a prestigious prize (i.e. it gets reported on in the New York Times) and has a significant monetary award, but its main benefit, at least from my point of view, is that it confers a measure of legitimacy on an artist and upon a body of work. As I’m entering the exhibition phase in the development of American Nukes, I think such an endorsement might prove decisive in convincing art museums, which might have little to no familiarity with my topic, to agree to a show. The first thing I did was to write a short essay outlining the importance of the project and to make explicit its connections to the threat posed by AI and by AI-enabled bioterrorism. That would be the foundation upon which I would build my application. Imagine my surprise when I finally opened the official application and found…