Total Recall: All Clear
Total Recall: All Clear, 2024.
We are all serial consumers of empty simulations.
The constant regeneration of the past through new technologies, and the non-stop consumption of recycled cultural copies, creates loops where the comfort of the familiar dictates the novelty of the future. These newly developed technologies are harnessed to refurbish the old, enabling an overwhelming saturation of desires with shorter life spans: synthetic images, our newest drug.
My work has long been drawn to maximal extremes and the improbable. I use AI for its errors, imperfections, and its capacity to amplify mutations until they reach absurdity. This preference for manglecore — the antithesis of the Midjourney aesthetic — gave birth to Total Recall: a melding of Cronenberg, Mapplethorpe, and Rammstein.
Rather than an amalgamation of unknown synthetic faces or a smattering of celebrities, I wanted to work through a single, overdetermined subject. Tom Cruise — Hollywood's own Übermensch, the ultimate cultural icon and male sex symbol — turned out to be the perfect conduit. His face and the implicit edges of his varied public persona became the raw material for this fashion-inspired, erotic, narcissistic, impossible-bodies post-photography series.