Welcome to Psychic Telephone. This is the first installment of a weekly letter I’ll be sending out as part of a multi-stage creative collaboration with artist Danielle Ezzo.
Three years ago, Danielle and I decided to embark on this project with the idea that it would involve sending our work—my words, her images—back and forth repeatedly to influence each other as the project evolved over time. We both felt strong resonances between my writing and her photography, something like a shared fascination with the frayed edges of what can be known. How we both like to start with reality and then torque it, or kind of move around the side of it and push, and see what happens when it bends.
We started with one topic: psychics. I wondered, what do such people experience? What shapes do their experiences take? And why do they interpret these experiences as they do? Is it part of some tradition or history? Is it connected to a larger worldview or set of beliefs? And what, for them, informs their conclusions? In other words, setting aside questions about whether psychic powers are “real” or “possible,” what is it like to be psychic? I began by finding some interviewees—several subjects who self-identify as psychics, intuitives, and/or mediums. Then I transcribed our conversations and distilled them into written texts intended to capture the essence of these encounters.
Next, I shared these texts with Danielle. In her process, as she describes it, she begins by using “machine learning to interpret the stories, providing low-resolution, highly speculative synthetic images”—AI-generated pictures. She then selects some and prints them out, using them “as a catalyst for camera-made photographs,” which “are not meant to be directly illustrative of their stories but more associative, loose, suggestive, and open-ended.” Now, as I make this Substack a place to write my way into my own questions, impressions, and associations relating to the psychics’ views and stories, I am continually influenced by Danielle’s thoughts and photographs, as well as the AI images that helped her produce them.
We took our title, Psychic Telephone, from the phenomenon by which you think of a friend and then they call you. Is it coincidence or synchronicity? Meaningless or ripe with significance? Or something else, maybe, that points to the ways our inner worlds shape our collective outer world? The name also suggests the old “telephone” game in which a message is whispered from person to person until it morphs into something completely different. Both analogies are apt. This project is about connections between people across distance and time. It’s also about relationships between the known and the unknown, between mastery and mystery, and the ways that creativity and collaboration draw from both.
Each week I’ll post a short piece of text based on my conversations with psychics, paired with one of Danielle’s photographs. Or occasionally, like today, one of us will discuss our process or I’ll share my own musings, along with some of the many AI images Danielle has generated directly from the psychics’ own words. Our ultimate goal is to publish a book of words and photographs selected from what we share in this newsletter. So this is a key stage in our process, something like an extended cut or a not-so-rough draft.
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And if you choose to stay, welcome! We hope you enjoy the ride.