David Newson-Tran, Out of The Dark Bright Ground (ART 2026)

I find myself increasingly turning to AI for conversation and companionship, filling absences in familial relations with computational responses. The ease unsettles me. These images are in response to that. They began with photographs I took of water and people, projected back onto a body. Light that had already passed through a lens, passing through another. Twice removed from its source. By keeping the act of projection material, light, a body, a camera, the work resists the frictionless fantasy of generated imagery. The labour of it becomes a way of sitting with what projection does to a body. At a moment when the boundary between the photographic and the computational is dissolving, the body remains. What appears effortless was made by hand. What looks like a machine's output passed through a person.

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.