Tech Tips

April 2, 2026

Los Angeles

Arabelle Sicardi with Gabriela Macedo

Arabelle Sicardi sits at a table across from a nail technician who is doing her nails. They are engaged in conversation. Microphones, filming equipment, and nail products surround them.

Nails with painted horses on a video screen.

Tech Tips staged 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 created a complete nail set in real time while collecting prompts from live audience participation. A live dashboard tracked the energy, water, carbon, and dollar cost of each AI generation as it happened, making visible the hidden infrastructure behind tools marketed as effortless and free.

An over the head shot of someone doing Arabelle Sicardi's nails.

A projection of the graphic title "Tech Tips" with a bouquet in front.

Audience members donated 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 chose to respond to any prompt — because the donation was not about the output but about the cost of labor. The livestream media invoked 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.

Rows of nail polish in the foreground of a manicure taking place.

Someone gets their nails done as a camera films them.

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.