Here, drawings I made between the ages of 3 and 5 are in dialogue with images cooked up in AI. The drawings were done at a time I was learning how to write, when letters and numbers were evolving from the abstract to the symbolic. I see a parallel with the denoising process in generative AI where random data is made coherent. Not that I recall of course but I assume there must have been a feeling of unbridled, matter-of-fact exuberance while making those hundreds of drawings before and during kindergarten while I was immersed in a state of proto-art—before the concept of capital A “Art,” with all its baggage, had yet to manifest. Dipping my toe into Midjourney when it was still brand new evoked a similar sense of exploration and surprise via free-wheeling manipulation, only with a keyboard instead of crayons.

As I tend to do, vintage ephemera are sprinkled throughout, creating their own ghost residue. Scraps of poetry or fables I’d written years ago but had landed on the cutting room floor are reconstituted anew. For a few of these I asked chatgpt to remix my writings which I in turn continued to mash all over again, then asked the bot to spit out absurdist theorems summarizing these narratives, which made their way into several of the compositions.

As with previous work, I glue artifacts from my personal life into the compositions—bits of worn-out clothes, x-rays, zippers, belts, old photos taken over the years. At times I manipulate and blend the photos. For ex. the eerie face in “Boooo” is a blending of a CT scan I had years back mixed with some creepy Rorschachs from digital prompts. The image, along with a childhood drawing I’d done of a headless man, led to the text.

Ultimately each image might be considered a diagrammatic plate in a large, ongoing codex, each image implying cross-referential vectors zig-zagging here and there, “across time.” Connecting and reconstituting visual/textual information into maps intended not to lead to any closure but rather amplify the making of paths within the haunted forest of one’s thinking.