Body Horror  (7:10) – 2023

Body Horror is a video essay created using eight simultaneous recordings focused on the artist’s face. The work’s title alludes to the disquieting relationship between physical identity and digital distortion, underscoring the tension between bodily representation and its abstracted mathematical reconfiguration, in this case, to emphasize the artist’s personal experience with contemporary antisemitism. In the piece, the clips are trained and manipulated using an AI dataset of antisemitic images sourced from online forums, highlighting the multiplicity of imagery and the ease of creation enabled by generative imaging technologies from singular sources. Throughout the piece, a series of unreliable narrators speak on the artist’s personal stories, genetic makeup, and anxieties, framing the repeating, altered visuals of the same face digitally reinterpreted through reflections on identity, vulnerability, and cultural inheritance. Ultimately, their voices culminate in a prompt-based poem that serves as both a guide on how to create such images and a critique of generative imaging models, emphasizing the friction between quantifying human expression and algorithmic output.