The Dream Life of Data

2024

The language of data that creates the virtual world is written by our instrumental culture. However this language also has the capacity to act otherwise, to produce other realities – as when AI is said to hallucinate.

The images in The Dream Life of Data (2024-25) are photo-composite – photography in the expanded field. I think of this approach as photo-adjacent.

The component parts are generated using online apps plus other digital tools. With confounding combinations of words not readily parsed by large language models I get AI ‘text to image’ to generate off-beat source material. Using surprise and recognition as guides I navigate these figments and synthesize. I work in a playful, poetic and somewhat uncomfortable state of mind. I’m led by the material – my unconscious meets the internet’s unconscious. The Dream Life of Data accesses a kind of escape velocity where things are at once familiar and uncanny – an intra-psychic realm. These images tend to an other-worldliness that reflects the repressed while they veer toward the ineffable.