2025

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue

(ongoing)

When I was 12 years old, my mother’s frustration with me for not talking that much got to the point of argument.

“Why don’t you speak, like any other normal person?” she raised her voice at me.
I promptly answered,
“Instead of speaking, I have images in my head.”

Since then, at every family dinner, she tells this story as a joke so people don’t question why I’m the silent one in the family.

Our unconsciousness is a tricky territory, our deepest fears, memories, traumas, flashbacks, and free associations come to the surface mostly through some form of visual representation. We dream. We also assume that these thoughts and images are individual, our patterns and past are coming to the surface, and we embrace them with our uniqueness. But what if we could harness our collective unconsciousness?

The project deals with the subconscious, how patterns of our behavior are slowly taking over our lives without us even realizing it: human relationships, friendships, love interests, and our reoccurring schemas in our lives that without self-reflection are so hard to escape. Themes we discuss with our therapist but try to avoid in public.

I blend analogue photography, sketches, and AI-generated imagery,
I explore how unconscious thoughts shape our lives. The project reflects on memory, imagination, and the tension between control and algorithmic unpredictability.

As hard as I tried to escape AI as an image-making tool, in the end, I realized it’s the perfect one to talk about the collective subconscious. Do Androids dream of electric sheep? They certainly held a mirror of our collective visual connections and our deepest visual patterns, electric sheep of our communal automatism. The project steps into this visual labyrinth of our schemas. Not just mine, but our collective 21st-century digital subconscious.

I still don’t talk that much, but now at least my mother can see those images that I was talking about.