My project City of Roses, visualizes factual crime scene reports using AI as an exploration of camera-less photography and social phenomenon. There’s no lens, no print, and by default the work is intended to be viewed on a screen.

It’s an undertaking in world-building where the scenes and characters are fictional yet plausible in their veracity, and a process not dissimilar to writing theatrical scene descriptions. When coerced enough, the AI delivers rewards in the form of images that can and do run parallel with imaginative thoughts, and at times, the process functions as a game of semiotics where one or both players are lost in translation. I cannot help but be reminded of the Jean Baudrillard statement that, “Pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false," the "real" and the “imaginary.”

As an artist using lens-based media, my projects have often conceptualized the use of photography as a means to point beyond its material form and creating works that infuse qualities of the imagination. Through an investigation of photography’s ambiguous archetypes, my work has often explored relationships between political, social, and cultural perceptions by blending documentary and conceptual practice through narrative reconstructions.

The Uncanny Valley is a term used to describe the relationship between the human-like appearance of a robotic object and the emotional response it evokes.

In this phenomenon, people feel a sense of unease or even revulsion in response to humanoid robots that are highly realistic.