Under the Digital Sky
Context
In a world drowning in disposable images, I see painting as an act of sense-making. Painting slows down the act of seeing; it demands presence in an era designed for distraction. Entire economies are now built on attention as the primary product, making slowness—and, by extension, vision itself—a luxury. To paint these simulations in oil is to reclaim time, to extract beauty from the machine’s logic, and to elevate the artificial into something rare and irreplaceable. If images are becoming increasingly fleeting, can painting make them rare and sacred again?
The golden wireframes of these greenhouses mirror the digital architectures shaping our world—delicate, seductive, and engineered. Greenhouses are not merely spaces of cultivation; they are sealed environments that regulate life on their own terms. Like the silent infrastructures that govern our digital existence, these structures are built for optimization and extraction, reducing organic life to data.
Walter Benjamin proposed that mechanical reproduction erodes an artwork’s aura. But in the age of generative AI, what happens when images are born from the sterile logic of algorithms and lack an aura in the first place? The plants in these paintings have never known dirt, never reached for the sun, never unfurled in the wind. They are algorithmic simulations without scent, sap, or soil. By translating them from pixels into oil on canvas, I attempt to reverse the logic of computation—giving physicality to the ephemeral, insisting on materiality and time in a culture ruled by speed and simulation. Can something that never had an aura be given one through painting?
Beauty is not just a reflection of the algorithm’s seduction; to me, it is a tool for understanding the complex systems that shape our world. As we enter an AI-driven future, we need more than just technological literacy—we need a nuanced cultural fluency in how these systems shape us. Just as past revolutions in industry and information reshaped society, AI and attention-based economies demand a new way of thinking. Art can be that bridge—an invitation to slow down, to see more clearly, and to engage with the future on our own terms.
