Born Against My Will (2023)
“I have not been alone in my fascination and concern over AI technologies. In the spring of 2022 I began repeatedly visiting This Person Does Not Exist, a website that uses an AI process referred to as a “General Adversarial Network” to generate new, artificial portraits. Some of these images struck me with an odd feeling—I became obsessed with thinking of each face as a distressed individual pulled from the void and unable to do anything about it. With a quick refresh of the page, each one would disappear forever.
Soon I began transforming some of these faces into black-and-white, mugshot-like portraits. In early 2023, I compiled ten of these images into a photobook, titled Born Against My Will, and printed limited edition copies. The book features a short essay I wrote as a forward. With this series I considered the parallel between familial abandonment and auto-generation. What does it feel like to be pulled from nothingness into reality? What do you do when that reality is cruel, uninhabitable, and unfair?”
