This series uses appropriated photographic images and other elements that have ingested at least a part of them, as a source material. Gathered into a collection over a number of years, they have already been liquified, processed and reconstituted an undisclosed number of times, circulating freely in dematerialised forms and commonly encountered elsewhere through commercial, standardised modes of production, display and consumption. 

Before being appropriated, the images composited in this series are overloaded with signs that point towards other visual forms, saturated with specific codes, dialogues and clichés. The fields from which these images are sourced frequently take from and refer to each other, absorbing and assimilating one another’s images in order to build meaning into their own. Works in this series aim to describe a set of relations that technology has to images in its involvement within this cyclical and non-linear authorial process, calling into question their mutability. If images, constituent of digital forms, become fluid to perception, then what appears as ‘realistic’ within them over time, is determined by ideological forces acting on the processes by which images come into being. This implicates the way we think about and perceive forms, and forms of representation.

Far be it from suggestive of an underlying reality or essential quality things possess that images somehow obscure or otherwise reveal through absence or abstraction, this series does aim to address the coding of this sense of a veiled reality and the subsequent reflexivity this can be seen to have developed in our relationships to forms of representation, happening historically, through the production of images themselves.

AAW MM XX V utilises editing techniques that rely on AI-driven tools and methods of erasure to transform the material the works set out with. However, they do not carry appearances that are commonly associated with images made using AI-driven processes. Their ‘original’ content, made absent and reconfigured, opens an immersive, non-determinate space within the image, previously foreclosed by the image’s various other iterations and intentionally positioned against the reification (or naturalisation) of meanings these previous versions connote, with this as their particular end. What remains are familiar, refracted signs that anticipate being once again imprinted and transformed in this way, re-enacting this process as a somewhat more performative gesture. 

Responsive to the cyclical processes in which these images exist, this series is also screen-based, utilising predominant modes of commercial, consumer display technologies, such as OLED advertising screens and modified light-boxes to both display and constitute work. They absorb and appropriate use of these visual hardware that have become so deeply embedded in the ‘ordinariness’ of the familiar visual and technological landscape.