I confront two fundamentally connected topics in my work: the cognitive dissonance and emotional wounding of the human creature in relation to the exponential encroachment of technology into our lives; and the consequential loss of mystical states of connected experience with nature, necessary to our primal psychology, as a result of these digital distractions. It is intentional, albeit ironic, that I chose the command line, the camera, and the cursor as my tools.
My process typically involves three phases. First is the command line, or text editor, where I transcribe notes and passages from my hand-written journals to a digital space where I can quickly structure, demolish, and re-arrange a narrative or script. Subsequently, the narrative is translated to the camera, where I often forge deep into wilderness or desert areas to find dramatic landscapes to frame ideas into sonic, still, and moving images in a ritual context. Finally, the filmed imagery is imported to the computer for post-production, manipulation, and transformation by the cursor.
In the most recent revolution of my work, I began working with artificial intelligence (AI) to explore interpretations of my writing and captured images through the lens of machine learning and AI image-learning models. The results are proving both fascinating and ever-increasing in emotive density with each iteration. As the AI models learn, from my voice in poems, and vision of created images, it begins to branch into new permutations, weighted by my own aesthetic philosophy. The output is often unsettling, even grotesque, invoking a spectrum of strong responses from aversion to attraction in the viewer – a true embodiment of the uncanny valley.
Part of the philosophy which informs my work developed during my undergraduate studies while reading Heidegger’s essay The Question Concerning Technology. Heidegger proposes: “Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens.” Further into this essay, Heidegger posits that technology is a type of sentient poesis that requires humans to bring itself into new forms and functions of being, prompting its own creation and evolution, rather than humans discovering and making it intrinsically for their own purposes.
In the past year, the writing of American anthropologist Loren Eiseley decisively influenced my inquiry and inspired me to pursue the concept of the “whirlpool” – an all-consuming maelstrom by which technology (e.g., progress) draws the natural experience out of humanity, leaving irreparable psychological and ecological damage in its wake.
It is the juxtaposition of these two theories that most intrigues and compels me to create through technology with the intent of questioning the momentous nature of our relationship to the very same – and at what expense?