By the time Marin began sending me transcripts from her interviews, I already had a sense of how I wanted to use that text as source material for the images I was making. In the summer of 2023, I was commissioned to create work for Dear Dave, a New York–based photography magazine, for an issue on AI. I wrote a twelve-stanza breakup poem and fed it into a generative AI model, which produced batches of low-resolution thumbnails—synthetic images meant to represent each stanza. I printed them and brought them into the studio, using practical effects and selective digital tools to create photographs that would sit alongside the poem in diptychs.
That process laid the groundwork for Psychic Telephone. As Marin sent over transcripts, I pulled out sentences that struck me and fed them into the model. I quickly accumulated hundreds of 512-by-512-pixel thumbnails. But something was off. The technology had advanced since the Dear Dave commission—the images were more literal, and that made them feel lifeless. What draws me to working this way is when the machine produces something I wouldn’t imagine on my own.
From the start, I didn’t want to use consumer tools like DALL·E or Midjourney. I wanted direct access to the model—control over the settings, the data it drew from, and the amount of time it had to generate each image. Rather than edit the transcripts, I left the language intact and adjusted the model’s “steps”—essentially, how long it thinks before creating an image. By limiting those steps and using imperfect training data, I began getting stranger, more associative results. The images started to feel surprising again.
Once I selected images to print and bring into the studio, I hit another wall. I’d plan a photo, gather props, and try to re-create the idea. But the first shot—the one I’d worked out in my head—was usually the least successful. The images that stuck with me came before or after: the in-between moments, the unexpected ones. These B-sides had an uncanny energy I couldn’t explain.
So I let go of rigid planning and gave myself permission to explore. As with the well known improv prompt, I began to “yes, and” myself—welcoming what followed instead of forcing a single idea. I stopped trying to control the outcome and started thinking of myself as a vessel for something moving through me.
This way of working echoes something often said in creative circles: that creativity is a kind of force, a flow that you get into. If that’s true, then my job is to create the conditions for images to arrive and to be receptive when they do. Maybe that’s why AI is often framed in mystical terms—not because it’s actually magic, but because it reflects back a kind of collective imagination.
That’s the key: In this project, my role shifted. I collaborate with the machine, with Marin, and with my own intuition. Marin collaborates with her subjects, and they’re reaching for something beyond themselves, too. This work isn’t just about technology. It’s about the different ways we tap into the same current.