Interpreting Symbiosis, 2020, Digital Photography

These digital photographs were taken during the UK lockdown during the artist’s exercise/walk time, they feature Interpreter X.

Interpreter X is part of the Interpreter Series, which is concerned with socio-political complexities and explored primarily through process, observation and sculpture.  The series always starts with an image created using an AI-powered tool.  The tool is used to abstract, as a way to embed hints and fragments onto the surface but is made deliberately ambiguous and unreadable.

 The use of fabric and thread which has associations with domesticity, migrant labour or garment workers, is contrasted with AI generated images, an industry dominated by white males.  

The name “Interpreter series” references both the experience of migrant children who are often their parents interpreters’, and the left-brain interpreter.  A neuropsychological concept developed by the psychologist Michael S. Gazzaniga and the neuroscientist Joseph E. LeDoux. It refers to the construction of explanations by the left-brain hemisphere in order to make sense of the world by reconciling new information with what was known before.

Through the multiple layers of abstraction, the work becomes increasingly ambiguous, leaving room for mis-translation; the need for an interpreter.