Adam Cole. Kiss/Crash, 2024, Courtesy of the artist. © Adam Cole.
Adam Cole. Rejected By My Own Robot, 2024, Courtesy of the artist. © Adam Cole
Adam Cole. Old Sights, New Visions, 2024, Courtesy of the artist. © Adam Cole
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ABOUT
LINKED SPHERES is an innovative online platform dedicated to critical analysis and idea exchange, fostering discussions with leading artists on the influence of technology in shaping our creative and societal landscapes.
Inspired by Bruno Latour’s insights, the project delves into the intricate relationships between various social spheres and the interconnected networks that define contemporary existence, focusing on the intersections of art, technology, and human experiences.
Through captivating conversations and showcased artworks, LINKED SPHERES examines how technological advancements such as AI, robotics, and virtual reality impact personal relationships and fundamental rights. Featured artists actively engage with and challenge technology, offering unique perspectives on this dynamic relationship.
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Adam Cole
featured by Haami Nyangibo
Adam Cole is an American new media artist based in London, who specialises in exploring the intersections of identity, intimacy, and technology. His work involves the use of AI, microprocessors, 3D rendering engines, and creative coding algorithms to create immersive, interactive installations that challenge conventional narratives. A notable piece, Kiss/Crash, reimagines the iconic Hollywood kiss through AI, transforming car crashes into romantic scenes, thereby exploring the tension between real experiences and artificial representations in the digital age.
Cole’s art reflects a rich queer tradition, twisting popular media conventions to reveal unspoken meanings and critique contemporary digital culture. His installations, like Crash Me, Gently and Me Kissing Me, invite audiences to engage actively, often highlighting the complex dynamics of desire and representation. Recognised by prestigious platforms such as the Lumen Prize and exhibited internationally, Cole pushes the boundaries of how technology mediates our personal and collective identities.
Haami Nyangibo: How does your work, such as Kiss/Crash, reflect a queer perspective on popular media and technology?
Adam Cole: A queer perspective, yeah. So when it comes to kiss crash is obviously obsessed with this cinematic image of the Hollywood kiss. And it’s repeated across five or seven different screens, depending on the installation. And what is also clear is that many of the times, it’s this auto erotic kiss between me and myself. The impetus for this obsession is that I grew up in New York watching arguably way too many films. It was my go to place between plans, if I just had some free time. I think New York has this really casual movie culture of just like, oh, I’ve got a couple hours to kill. I’ll hop into a theater. And the result of that obsession was that I consumed a lot of images of romance and life in general. And of course, it was often these heterosexual depictions of love that were glamorous and seductive and alluring and arousing in so many ways. But also, of course, it was impossible fiction. As a queer kid who is still coming to figure out my own sexuality, I realized this feeling of friction without quite understanding what it meant. And it set this lifelong pursuit of understanding what it means to live in the shadow of these artificial images. These films are often rom coms that are thought of as so flimsy and meaningless, almost as if they’re not worthy of our attention.
But I think all of these depictions, from the most intense dramas, big budget films like Titanic, to art house films, to rom coms, set such a precedent of what we expect from our relationships and from our intimacies and from our experiences of the world, that we’re always living this double life of what those look like in practice, which is often quite different and what we’ve consumed on the screen. I think that’s my queer experience that sharpened that focus. But I think it’s something that people really, anyone can relate to. I mean, any sort of minority is going to recognize that they’re not reflected in these images most often. But even if you take the most, like, straight cis person, they even, they probably cannot feel that they are seen in these images.
They are bigger than life itself, and even the way that they are projected is bigger than life itself. I think I said this last time, that even the actors probably can’t live up to their own projections. And if they can’t do it, like, how can any of us do it? So there’s this weird friction. But I think something I’m struggling with is that I could say, well, then let’s shut down movies. They’re dangerous. They’re not worth going to shut down all media representations. And I don’t think that is the answer, because movies are also. Cinema has been one of my deep loves that I’ve been fortunate to enjoy. And some filmmakers have been able to do stuff with the technology that is so gorgeous and graceful and sublime.
There is this potential to overcome some of those pitfalls, some of those limitations. And that’s something I try to inhabit in my own practice, is understanding the constraints of the technology, but looking for opportunities to find grace beyond it.
Adam Cole. Kiss/Crash, 2024, Courtesy of the artist. © Adam Cole.
How do you address the ethical implications of AI in your art, particularly when exploring themes of desire and representation?
I think as humans we have a history of knowing how dangerous images are. So many of our western religions forbid depictions of religious figures because they knew how effective it was. And this is before television, even just depictions in churches and religious spaces. It was too risky to have flooded our world with images. The way that AI is going to accelerate that is something I reflect on.
We’ve totally lost our appreciation for how powerful images can be, but having said that, in terms of the ethics, I think there’s many layers to consider, especially with image generation. The first one that comes to mind is the way that it is sourced. In terms of the data sets. This is an extractive process of pure, almost entirely non consensual, between a public that was told, put all of your information on the Internet and it’s safe. And how could people have predicted that it would be sucked into a machine that would then pump out replicas? I’m very sympathetic to people who feel like they’ve been robbed, because I think that they have been robbed. I don’t have a good answer except to say that it’s something we can’t sweep under the rug or ignore.
Then the question is, if I really feel that way, then shouldn’t I be not using these models? Part of me thinks that I’m validating my own use cases so that I feel comfortable. But I do think that there’s a necessity to investigate these models and to try to find ways to do more interesting stuff with them. Because if we just leave it to OpenAI and Meta and say we’re too pure to work with them, I think we’ll end up in a worse spot. So it is a bit of an ethical negotiation than ‘I feel so comfortable that this is right, and that’s fine’. There is really interesting stuff that has been done with.
Part of the problem is that these models have gotten so big that it’s no longer possible to work without these massive data sets. But some people are finding ways to work with smaller data sets, smaller things trained on their own work. You can, for instance, fine tune a stable diffusion model on your own artwork. Of course, its ability to even pick up on that is based on it being trained on all images that ever existed. But it starts to feel a bit more personalized. So maybe that’s a direction that is sensible. On the other side of [the] ethics is the use of these technologies to kind of proliferate imagery, create content.
So I think, I don’t know if it’s an ethical question, but we know that these technologies are going to perpetuate biases across so many intersections of society, and it is by nature of the way that they’re trained and by nature of the data that they’re trained on, which is, of course, an output of society. So, of course, a reflection of that is going to perpetuate whether any exists in those power structure, as an artist, I think there is a need to understand the process by which those homogeneous cliches are perpetuated and to find ways to expose that and overcome it through more interesting imaginations of what is possible outside of these machines. So that, as a personal motivation, is both an aesthetic goal but also an ethical goal.
And there’s, of course, a whole economic question to it as well, where I think they’re upset about it both spiritually and that it’s tough to see your aesthetics stolen from you in some strange way. But there’s a huge economic threat as well for artists who do this for a livelihood. As someone who makes very little money from this, in terms of my expectations, my motivations for doing it, I feel not as uncomfortable for companies who are charging money to create imagery that is stolen. So there’s a question of compensation that needs to be had as well, it’s a bit crass because it’s a capitalistic solution to a capitalistic problem to say ‘all right, we did steal your stuff so we’ll pay you for that inconvenience’.
It doesn’t make me feel so much better, but it is at least something.
In your piece, Rejected By My Own Robot, you employ humor and are quite provocative. And I wanted to discuss the balance between humor, provocation, and critical reflection in your work and how you use these elements to engage your audience.
I’ve always found humor to be such an effective way to invite an audience into something that might be more thoughtful than it appears on its surface. With Rejected By My Own Robot, the humor is more obviously in the twist at the end. Even in Kiss/Crash, which has real imagery, images of violence and sexuality, there is also an element of humor that I think draws people in to begin with. I think it helps people let their guard down a bit when they encounter something that is unfamiliar and allows them to maybe explore the ideas more creatively. There’s stereotypes of contemporary art being quite opaque and quite difficult to decipher.
It’s not to say that I find my work so easy to consume, but it gives someone an entry point to engage with the work and maybe have a more pleasurable experience interacting with it. Especially for work that is interactive, I find that humor is so effective as an invitation, because with interactive work, you need their attention. With something like a film, they can be sitting there and totally mindlessly dozing off. But for something where they need to actually interact with it, they need to. It’s more of a conversation. So bringing that level of humor, I think, helps maintain that attention. I think it’s also just a bit of my personality that seeps into the work. I think that’s nice.
Sometimes it’s subconscious and instinctual more than planned, like this has to be 20% funny, 50% serious, and 30% something else. It’s a bit of a stylistic habit.
You mentioned your work being quite engaging with the audiences, which it is. I was wondering what inspired you to make that choice, to be quite engaging with the audience, so not making something passive.
I’m just really excited about that opportunity to make stuff interactive and to break the expectations of what these mediums look like and the borders between them. I saw that a lot at SXSW and other film festivals that are opening expanded sections. They used to be focused on VR and XR stuff, then they segued into MR, and now they’re getting even more broad about where interactive technologies end and film and art begins. I think that’s really healthy. I just find it exciting and I think it helps with that element of attention. It’s such a valuable thing to have with somebody, especially now with our phones, it’s almost impossible to get anyone to focus. And there’s a bit of ego in that.
It’s like, well, if I want you to pay attention, but I think there’s also a recognition that any successful aesthetic experience requires attention. There’s something almost intimate about having that relationship with an audience. So I find the interactive elements a very effective format. Often I’ll often work on things that are kind of traditional, have traditional 2D outputs, film outputs, and think, how can I add something to this that expands it into something either 3D or something interactive or, again, it is a bit of a stylistic instinct to consider that, and we just have so many new technological tools that enables that kind of interaction. Especially real time, interactive stuff. People have been doing real time stuff since, well, since forever. It’s getting easier and, it’s a less sexy way to talk about it, but it’s now easier to make something that can work in real time and be transported to a gallery. The barriers for what we can do is constantly being lowered and that is something that’s fun to explore.
Adam Cole. Rejected By My Own Robot, 2024, Courtesy of the artist. © Adam Cole
You touched on digital culture and the fact that everyone is on their screens. I just want to get your opinion on the impact of digital culture on artistic expression.
Yeah, I think specifically in relation to AI imagery and content, we use this term AI art quite broadly, but so much of what is generated, I think is better termed AI content. The fact that we can produce an infinite amount of images in an hour, I think it has this demand on our attention that’s insane. How do we consume so much stuff? I think it is not a coincidence that this technology is proliferating in the age of social media, which is so perfectly paired with this generative format, in that you can post something every 30 minutes and get likes and engagement, and that leads you to post again to get more likes. There is no value in depth and there’s barely value in attention.
It’s really this increase in speed that is, I think, moving beyond what human brains can actually comprehend and engage with.I have a bias that artistic experiences are valuable, and I actually don’t know if that’s so common because it is not always easy to have that. I find it difficult myself to give things the attention it deserves. It’s not like I’m off Instagram and going to museums and spending 7 hours in the gallery. I talk about this as someone who sees it in myself. The formats that I find most engaging are becoming increasingly ones that demand my attention by their very nature, be it literature or films, because you can’t just pass by.
If I start reading a book, I can feel my brain fight it. It is such a different rhythm from most of my day, but if you give it 20 minutes, an hour, you get into that flow and you experience it so much more, just a totally different mindset than if you just are scrolling past words. So I think art, we can’t just tell people, pay attention. Books have the benefit of forcing you to read, but also, it’s impossible to get people to buy books. Every medium has its own challenge of getting people into that state of flow and attention.
For my practice, I find that those interactive elements, the use of imagery that’s alluring and seductive, and themes that people can maybe relate to are all strategies that I employ, I think people do it through many different ways. The word attention, I think, is so centered in my thinking about this stuff. There’s a couple references I think of often. I don’t know if this is so relevant. We don’t have that much time.
There’s a scene in the movie Lady Bird where Lady Bird is writing about Sacramento, and it’s for a college essay. She’s talking to her Dean about it who’s a nun, and she says, ‘I can see so clearly that you love Sacramento’, Lady Bird is like, ‘what do you mean? I just pay attention’. The Dean says ‘don’t you think they’re the same thing, love and attention?’ I think that’s so true that they are almost the same. It is the things that we love, that we give our attention to. And attention in its own way, is an expression of love.
So the fact that we are losing that attention is in some ways representative of this diminishing of our love for each other, for things, for experiences, and the decrease of intimacy as we drown further and further into this deluge of content.
I think there’s one element of it is that nostalgia is so tied to these, to the way AI image generators work in the moment, because they’re stylization machines more than they are anything else. They are you. It knows the names of every style, and it’s style without context. It’s something I haven’t even figured out the language to talk about yet, because all the stuff we are nostalgic for comes with a context of why that was the case. Now we can reproduce that style without any of the context and it causes this dissonance of ‘what does it mean to recreate the scene I’m looking at as a 1950s Hollywood image’, when it’s not related to the technology that it used to produce it, not related to the fashion that was popular.
There’s this strange emptiness to it and the fact that you can move through time and styles so quickly is, I think, something that’s very inherent to the medium, repetition, variation and style. It’s the thing that AI does best. I do have this nostalgia for cinema, specifically these cinematic icons from the last century. And I think, for me, I find it surprising that I am so infatuated with it, because they’re not really the visual language that we see day to day. It almost would make more sense to be obsessed with influencers, signifiers, and social media myths.
But in some ways, I have more distance from those icons of the slightly farther past, although not that far in the past, and they’re still quite present, that I can almost appreciate how they operated more through that distance and see how they’ve infected the culture and created these myths in really effective ways that have continued to perpetuate now today in what we see in social media and other digital contexts. I think it is a useful way for me to reflect on the ways that images operate at a time that now feels more tame, and then extrapolate how those same processes are repeating and accelerating today. But I think there’s also a certain glamour to those images as well that they were effective in the 1930s and they’re effective today. There’s something very seductive about them, and I can recognize their artifice while still being drawn to them and understanding that’s a dangerous relationship to have.
But there is something I was thinking about also, where in the 20th century, the proliferation of popular culture allowed for these icons to be so prevalent and to kind of be so hegemonic in their scale. And now with these algorithms, you could make the argument that it has died because everyone has their own algorithm. We don’t see all the same stuff. I think there’s some truth to that in how we relate to these, to what would be the icons of 2025. I don’t know exactly, but my friend made the point that TikTok is still such a world of replication, but you’re recreating sounds or dances or stuff that you don’t even know what the source is. And it’s this weird hall of mirrors where you’re mirroring something that you don’t like.
It’s not so different, I think, from the 20th century, where we’re just these layers of reflection and repetition and this hyper reality of not knowing what the original even is. And in fact, the fact that it has no original does not bother anybody in the slightest. So there’s, there are, it’s not, in my mind, a totally new paradigm. It’s just again, this weird acceleration as media technology has continued to expand its fingers into everything.
Adam Cole. Old Sights, New Visions, 2024, Courtesy of the artist. © Adam Cole
Absolutely. I always now make a point that if I really like a sound, I try to find out where it comes from. Half the time it comes from very distressing sources. Having the worst time of their life, and everybody’s just like making really fun videos on top of. Another thing I’ve also noticed withTikTok is almost the opposite side, it facilitated the existence of real micro influences. People with highly engaged viewers and people watching them.
I’ve seen this in art, I’ve seen this on social media where you might only have two or three thousand followers but these people that buy every single thing they produce. People that are completely locked into what you’re doing and will love and watch and follow you everywhere, which I think is super interesting. But there’s also, really small pockets of real intimacy that you have with someone that you don’t actually know. And it’s a false sense of intimacy as well, because you see every part of their life, but you don’t actually know them.
It’s interesting. Because in some ways, maybe you could argue it’s a great thing that, it’s what people who would support TikTok. I’m having the debate in my head, why should you go have to fight to get into a network, to make your content, to get on a tv show, if you could just talk directly to people and have that sense of intimacy directly with your audience, which could be that actually is a better model for content creation. I think the problem, the most obvious problem, that already makes me uncomfortable, because there’s things that I love about the fact that we do see the same things, but I’ll put that to the side.
The reason that model is so problematic is because the algorithms are the ones who dictate what stuff you see and what communities you’re pulled into. It’s so often fed on states of arousal, either sexual or aggressive, It really does draw on, I don’t want to say your worst instincts to imply that humans, like, I don’t know, it sounds,weirdly critical, but on your most base or instincts, even that sounds coded. But it just shows you a lot of sexual content or aggressive content, and what it always is, it’s extreme content, and it pushes you slowly into these buckets of extremism, not necessarily, ’extremism’. Extremism can have a lot of different flavors.
I think when people hear extremism, they have really specific things in mind. Whether it’s, far-right Trumpianism or islamic fundamentalism. People jump to these very specific ideas. But there’s so many flavors of extremism that the algorithms push you towards, because they’re trying to get a strong and emotional reaction out of you so that you click and come back and get that excitement again, which is something I see very much in common with the ways that Hollywood operated with these extreme romances or action films. It’s something in my piece within the Kiss/Crah installation. It’s the piece called Crash Me Gently, where people can accelerate this foot pedal, and it transformed the calm kiss into these more extreme representations of that kiss.
Whether it starts to get more pornographic or more violent or starts to explode in its intensity, people are in control of that experience. It mimics the hunt for more extreme content that we’re all incapable of saying no to. Also the sense that no matter how much you go deeper or how much more extreme the content gets, it’s never quite satisfying. It’s this insatiable hunger for more. I think when it comes to this model, that’s what worries me most about the fact that we feel like we’re in control, because it’s like I’m the content creator, you’re the viewer, but there’s so many invisible structures around how that relationship is formed and accessed that needs to be interrogated.
I think specifically in watching cinemas die slowly, going into a movie theater with strangers is its own intimate experience that I think is quite profound. It’s something that I didn’t recognize as profound when I was younger because it was so standard. But now it feels so rare to have that shared experience that to see it be superseded by this algorithmic stream that’s made just for you is, I don’t know. I think there’s something lost, and I don’t know exactly how to articulate it, but it’s something I reflect on.
I was really influenced by the book expanded cinema by Gene Youngblood where he describes the development of media technologies and media art in the 1960s and 1970s with artists like Nam June Paik and Carolee Schneiderman and a bunch of other people who are doing really interesting stuff. What I find so striking about his writing is that he’s incredibly prophetic about how he sees this all playing out, he describes TikTok almost exactly in a way that I’m like, this is crazy. But what’s most surprising is that he’s so optimistic about what the effect of this democratization of media technologies will do to us as a society.
He’s so confident that if we can just get our present ourselves in these media streams, one to each other, instead of these broadcast networks, there’ll be this explosion of expanded consciousness and interconnectedness, love, and ecstasy. And it’s obviously so coded in this California 1960s psychedelic movement, it is not a surprise to see that positivity and optimism about what the technology would do. But the revelation looking back is he couldn’t have been more wrong about how this would play out. He was blind to the way that these technologies would be co opted by capitalist forces.
I think the impact of these technologies is so pervasive in our relationships to each other and our relationships to ourselves that they become a bit invisible and insidious in the ways that they impact us and our own self image of ourselves and the image of our relationships with each other. There’s so many different strands of how that is working. It’s not like it’s only because of Tinder and that’s it. We talked about attention and the ways that these phones are impacting our attention. We have with one another, both romantic relationships, but even friendships and familial relationships. There’s some study that just having a phone on the table lowers people’s engagement in a face to face conversation, the fact that we so willingly forfeited those intimacies for these conveniences is something we don’t really reflect on or that everyone is aware of. No one, I think, even likes it. And yet there’s no escape from this new reality.
Adaptability is something I think about. It was something I started to think about with the piece Rejected By My Own Robot because I built it. It’s not really that representative of a person. It’s just a pair of lips. And even when I was testing it on myself, I was surprised by how quickly I fell into these motions that felt authentic with this robotic pair of lips.There’s some human instincts that are so ingrained in us that even when we know it’s artificial, we can’t. It still is real enough in some ways, or some part of our brain doesn’t care. And I think I see it also with chat GPT, where I know I’m talking to a robot. There’s no illusions.
It’s in the name, it’s in every disclaimer. But you forget because you’re just talking and it looks like what you think a human talks like. You don’t have to constantly remind yourself that it’s fake. The reason I reflect on that is because I think we’re going to so quickly forfeit even more of ourselves to these AI bots and these AI intimacies. Without going so Sci-Fi esque I wouldn’t be surprised if we very quickly give up these ideas of romance and affection towards these AI machines, too, even the extreme is like, I’m dating an AI. I think that is not unlikely, but there’s other ways we forfeit our intimacies, and it’s all because of the promise of comfort and ease. Sherry Turkle writes about this much more eloquent than me and her book alone together.
But the promise of these companies is speed, efficiency, and control, and those are feelings of security, that humans are just almost incapable of choosing something else that’s more risky and dangerous and hurtful, which is what a human relationship is by its very nature. So how can we expect us as people to choose the one that sucks in some ways when there’s this promise of ease and comfort as the alternative and we’re constantly making those sacrifices? And, you know, I’m not. I don’t want to sound so radical that I’m like, I want to move back to a cave because there’s a lot of comforts that society has brought me that I am very much unwilling to give up. But this feels like a last frontier of, surely we can’t give up this, sexuality and intimacy and connection, because I think we’re going to see it decay more and more, and it’ll be. A lot will be lost in that exchange.
Yeah, absolutely. I was really surprised to see that one of the most successful AI companies is actually, a role playing AI company that has millions of users. I couldn’t believe it. It scares me that it’s already here and I guess in the way that it’s manifesting as well, and that people are literally creating, as you said, something out of comfort that’s able to kind of replicate the human experience-ish. I was just really shocked by that. In hindsight, it shouldn’t have been. It was always on the horizon, but I’m surprised it’s happening right now..
There’s a weird feedback loop in that there is this loneliness epidemic that is, I think, unique to this era. And I don’t think there’s any surprise about what it is in our lives that is causing it in terms of further isolations and the way that these technologies enable more isolationism. So not to invent that problem, humans have always dealt with loneliness. I’m not saying we should abolish it. There’s a way to abolish it, but. But there’s something, there’s this new flavor to it that is invented because of our relationship to these technologies. Then for a tech company to then say, oh, are you feeling lonely? Let me solve that for you. For a $9.99 monthly fee is this quite familiar model, but devastating in its own way.
How do you envision future technical, technological advancements influencing your artistic practice?
Yeah, I think something I always need to put a disclaimer at some point, I talk about this stuff, so I think critically that sometimes they’re like, well why are you using it? That’s a really valid question, but I think there is something that needs to be said about how fun it can be to use these technologies. It can be a really joyful and exciting process because of the discovery, because of playing with something that feels so magical sometimes to finding the balance between your human input and the machine outputs, and it can be quite a fun process. So there is room for joy in the creation, which I think is so important, because if you’re not finding that joy in your practice, then there’s probably better things you could do with your time. Not a problem.
But one of the realities of being a media artist is that things change so quickly. Now, I think that’s probably something media artists have always said, but it feels more extreme now where I’m using one tool today and next week there’s a totally new version of it that does something similar. And you have, there’s this pressure to keep up, and there’s a real premium on novelty in this discipline that I think is misplaced often. But using the newest tool can often help your work find a bigger audience because there’s that excitement for it. So there’s always a balancing act between keeping up just as a practice, recognizing the commercial value of that novelty, and also doing work that is focused and meaningful for its own sake, not just as a tech demo.
I think in the way that I’ve handled it, is that I always love to kind of take a little taste of everything that comes out to be like, oh that’s interesting. I like that. I don’t like that. But once I settle into making something, there’s a time where I have to say, these are the tools I’m using, and I’m going to do as deep a dive into these tools and their aesthetic possibilities and their limitations in some ways become a strength in contouring what the work will be. Because limitations are an artist’s best asset sometimes. And that box around it gives you the room to focus and make something. Then when you’re done with it, there’s stuff that I use for Kiss/Crash that I wouldn’t use today, both because I don’t think it runs anymore on computers and even looking at it already has a retro feel, which is crazy because it wasn’t made that long ago, but it’s stuff that no one would touch today because it’s outdated. So there’s also some value to latching onto something that people will move past because you’re not going to be compared to the aesthetic that is so, like, you can recognize these trends come so quickly because they fill up your social media feed. And sometimes being in opposition to that has more value than trying to keep up with it.
There’s an almost instant nostalgia already for stuff that’s a year old. I think for artists in my field of AI imagery a longing for that stuff because it had this more interesting. There’s a beauty in those glitches, and those are what’s being ironed out with every release, to get this glossy Sora aesthetic that just looks like a commercial and that’s obviously their kind of end goal. But there’s something lost in that messiness when you could see the outlines of the technology and understand its failures helped reveal its function in a way that was more effective than stuff that’s.
What are your biggest inspirations?
I’ve been talking about cinema and stuff from a very specific era. I find that I’ve been reading a lot of things from the sixties and seventies. When I started Kiss/Crash, I happened to have been reading Susan Sontag’s On Photography. It is still the underlying text that has guided so much of my work. And I have a feeling it will not disappear from my mind because first of all, she’s just such an incredible writer, but she writes about photography in a way that feels like it was written this morning. She’s writing 50 years in the past, maybe even 60 years in the past at this point. But she picks up on this anxiety about what living in this image world means.
I think at the time it must have sounded more radical because the proliferation of images was still maybe fresher in the sixties and seventies than it is today. Seeing someone raise that alarm and then seeing that alarm ignored and then seeing how the situation has only accelerated has been. It’s so precise with its diagnosis. But at the end, offers a solution, which is not something you hear a lot about, she uses kind of interesting ecological language to say that we need an ecology of images, that there’s no way to escape this image world.
But what we do have control around is the quality of the images we consume and that there is value in the personal curation of what we take in. I think from her other work, I kind of infer that if you surround yourself with images that you feel elevate your spirit, it has a reflection on your experience of your reality. I obviously have no shortage of books and stuff that I think about, but she remains my central figure. And then I guess in an art practice, I often see a lot of Cindy Sherman’s work in my pieces because it’s playing with these film representations and projecting the self into these myths. And the way that myth reflects back on me is really present in a lot of my work.
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