2020-23
Desire and Is it the dog’s life to sit by the window? were created by allowing text-to-generative Ai to have an intervention with 6x7 film negatives in order to create its version of the ideal fetishized Other.
I corresponded with anonymous internet users (mostly self-proclaimed male) for several years, collecting writings that described their desires and fantasies, whether “true” or fabricated. These writings were combined to create (Have you seen) This Man, and were offered to the generative AI to provide it with guidance while producing its images. Through this process, two related cultural maps of perversions were created: one uncensored human-based map gathered from the fantasies described by anonymous humans, and a second censored AI-based map of desire - or, taken together, a glimpse into the mass psyche of (patriarchal) fetish exerted virtually, or what I have coined as the anonymity of feral internet desire.
A scanner is a camera with a modified shutter and an almost impossibly shallow focal length - a combination that allows for a photograph to explore itself as a scandal of time and contact.
The machine is used to meticulously copy, scan, and print - creating a series of physically manipulated collages using source material pulled from years of emailing men on cragislist about their desires. Language has limits; some perversions appear when we are pressed up against them. Or - this language, its history, its patterns, does not
allow for a non-violent method of speaking about intimacy, about what we might want if we were outside of it.