About the work
“What’s your work about?” I explore language, I answer; its instability, its tyranny, its capacity for poetics and how it unavoidably mediates reality. “Oh, I was sure it was about AI. You use AI and you make prints with AI, don’t you?”
I’ve long been obsessed with language, knowledge and value systems. AI, therefore, seems inevitable. But so is paper, text, image, speech and voice, to name a few other ‘abouts’. Our relationship to language is integral; a revolution is taking place inside language – and the fluidity of code, through which AI operates, seems fundamentally related to the fluidity and complexity the world is grappling with today.
We’re lving though a linguistic/techno/scientific revolution which is happening whether we want it to or not, know about it, or (and for a variety of reasons, some of which render individuals and groups relatively blameless, some less so) remain barely aware of associated, often violent, or disturbing paradigmatic shifts and relational consequences.
Such a reality both drives and emerges from our informational age, an era in which everything is potentially reduced to a soup of undifferentiated slop, apparently leaving us untethered, prone to paranoia and resistant to reason; but it also brings experimentation with form, allowing us to address systems and modalities that want overturning and/or reconfiguring. Straight dichotomies no longer look so certain, despite voices insisting on the opposite. In a universe underpinned by digital systems, ancient absence and presence are usurped by pattern and pedesis (a term employed by Thomas Nail to describe material movement that isn’t utterly unconstrained, although from our point of view, can seem erratic and chaotic).
Addressing the potentials and risks, I focus on how contemporary media influences and constitutes or destroys our world (often simultaneously). I aim to celebrate and exploit the dissolution of entrenched binaries and dualisms within a symbolic realm that feels dangerously unstable and/or wonderfully fluid, depending on your point of view and tolerance for opposing tensions and/or acceptance of ‘superposition’ (a term borrowed from quantum mechanics by François Laurelle and subsequently Katarina Kolozova to describe the way opposing forces can exist together while transforming each other, i.e. deeply entangled). However, I also acknowledge and worry about resulting instability and a loss of collective ground, even though much of that ground seems redundant, if not antediluvian. As I work through paradoxes and philosophical conundrums, I do my utmost to avoid negative nostalgia, nihilism and sanctimony, holding on to empathy for all I’m worth. (Of course, I frequently fail. Nevertheless, empathy and a commitment to pluralism, underpinned by Martin Buber’s concepts of dialogue and listening, sit at the core of my project. Listening sometimes entails hearing, not to what is voiced, but to what isn’t.)
Influenced by Maya Deren’s call to discover a new language for film in the 1930s and 40s, in the 21st century, I embrace an expanded definition of 'the image', encompassing optical, sonic, and haptic elements. I categorically reject accepted media hierarchies. Poetry can be made with anything, even shit. So far, I’ve avoided literal shit but will mix various materials – from tinfoil, film, and textiles to AI-generated content and organic matter – while rejecting received wisdom about the value of this or that medium over another. This results in projects that aim to traipse across and through boundaries, manifesting simultaneously in print, online, or installation, with image, text and performance. Nevertheless, I heed Hannah Arendt’s warning in Truth and Politics; beware of images made in the mechanised (and now automated) world, however they come into being.
Books that are important to me right now:
Arendt, H. (1968) 'Truth and Politics', in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. Enlarged edition. New York: Viking Press, pp. 227-264.
Buber, M. (2002) Between Man and Man. Translated by R. G. Smith. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203220092.
Deren, M. (1946) An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film. New York: The Alicat Book Shop Press.
Hayles, N. K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nail, T. (2019) Theory of the Image. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vallor, S. (2024) The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking. Oxford: Oxford University Press.