The Death Of Every Moment [2023 - Ongoing]

With the selection of work presented in The Death Of Every Moment, I aim to visually represent the fallibility I perceive within the process of recollection, questioning whether the machine can learn to visually replicate my fragmented encounters of the sublime.

I feed the machine learning networks my personal archive of photographs consisting of landscapes

I’ve captured through my search for sublime encounters. The objective here is to examine if the generative output shares the inherent fallibility of the ambiguous experience of remembering. I am keen to explore the potential dialogic and collaborative relationship between the Human and the Non-human, through the dissolution and entangling of the objective forms seen through a mechanical eye.

This tension within an implicit symbiotic relationship releases the responsibility from myself to record and (re)present reality, but rather it allows the work to express its potential for abstraction that could offer more of an insight than reality itself.

Through the physical generative labour with my darkroom process, I am addressing the potential tangibility with digital outputs by reframing them through alchemical experiments. I am simultaneously working with liquid silver emulsion on paper as well as corroding steel sheets with a bottle of dead film developer. I was inspired by the myth of Meng Po, the Goddess of Forgetfulness, who resides in the Buddhist underworld with the specific task of providing passed souls with the “Broth of Oblivion,” which removes all memories souls possessed before their reincarnation. This childhood fear of forgetting pushed me further into my practice to represent the process of remembering itself.

During a roll film development process, I discovered that the bottle of film developer I was using was dead. Instead of producing an image on the film negative, it would erase the entire roll of what was recorded. My interest in experimenting with this dead developer saw it as a metaphor for the "Broth of Oblivion". However, instead of allowing it to follow through with its process of erasure, I chose to use it as part of a corrosive mix to develop decay and deterioration on the surface of steel sheets instead.

I was attracted to the poetic nature of the erasure but I could not surrender to the inevitable process of forgetting. The alchemical process abstracts notions of landscape and natural elements from the rust and salt produced on the surface of the metal. I am desperately holding on to the desire to never forget.

With the organic reactions in both processes, there is a sense of unpredictability that is present, much like a sublime encounter for the first time. A sense of tangibility has now been brought into generative outputs imbuing it with an Auratic experience. I am contemplating through this circularity of decay and deterioration, embracing the fact that it draws me back to the natural elements within a landscape.

works on paper

works on steel