Not Yet

This work is a meditation on embodiment, tracing the boundary between the human and the machine. The process of digitalising the physical and then forcing the digital back into the physical becomes central to this exploration. It begins with three photographs of figures desolate within vast natural landscapes. Once captured, the living is translated into code: the skin dissolves into pixels, the landscape collapses into fragments. To the machine, I imagine, it becomes just this: data. To portray the way I imagine the machine translates these images, I glitched the photographs using different digital tools, revealing what the computer might “see,” as the images disintegrate into fields of lines, fragments, and distortion. This act of glitching both fascinates and unsettles me. It reveals a medium that operates beyond human understanding. It becomes a system of translation so vast that even those who design it cannot fully predict its outcomes. Why did the glitch decide to erase the body out in two of them? Why do the skies look like that? We try to make sense of it, seek logic in its patterns, yet perhaps the machine itself doesn’t know why it did what it did. We are left disconcerted. To reclaim some agency in this dark, unknowable system, I began to study and replicate the technology’s rhythms by hand. Through drawing, I allow the code-like lines to re-enter the realm of the tactile, reintroducing labour and time. The act becomes meditative, tracing the machine’s logic while reclaiming the human perspective. I am not the machine. The machine is not me. Not yet.