about not by, for not from

We look for aliens in space!  However, what could be more alien than the microbiome!?

One hundred trillion microbial organisms—bacteria, archaea, fungi, and viruses—co-inhabit the human gut, forming an ecosystem of deep-time intelligence. These ancient life forms have co-evolved with us as passengers and architects of physiology, emotion, and cognition.

Our microbiome speaks to the brain through electrochemical signals transmitted via the vagus nerve, forming a two-way information channel between the gut and cortex—between nutrients and thought. How have these ancient bacteria formed a central part of our body’s morphology, the vagus nerve? Co-evolution.

But it is not just biology that evolves—it is information itself. Amino acids on the Murchison meteorite which landed in Australia proved amino acids can form and survive in space, seeding self-replicating RNA that evolved into DNA and setting a precedent for information evolution in celestial space, now controlling our bodies’ evolution.

"well fed fucks" is a cursed data visualization of the AI crisis in which we find ourselves. Clean water scarcity, soaring stock prices, deadly air pollution, and real-time AI news feeds all compete for attention in a glitched-out generative visual display. This ever-changing document of the real-time push and pull of extreme wealth and poverty, technology-hype and ecological collapse can be tuned in and streamed anytime via the nearest terminal window.

People have computers to do the work that they used to do so that they can get more rest/leisure time, but then they don't take it. So, I had an idea that I would try to outsource resting/leisure to a computer. I tried to get ChatGPT to collaborate with me on an interface that let it rest, but when we got into the weeds of what that meant/whether or not an instance of ChatGPT really had the agency to produce a state of measurable reduced activity, the system crashed. 

The text in the video is drawn from the generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot called ChatGPT, which was released in December 2022. Directions and dialog performed by AI actors further sets the stage for an interactive art experience.

Ingredients: my iPhone recording from Eglise Saint-Orens in Auch, FR (May 17, 2025), drum sample from Buddy Rich’s appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (May 24, 1978) - Wendy French Barrett

*Artwork is best viewed from inside the cube*

In 2022 I experimented with Midjourney using prompts like: 
“5000 little gold dots arranged in a grid” and “10000 little gold dots arranged in a grid like Agnes Martin”. I absolutely loved the results, even though I haven’t developed them further, or even shown them, in these years that have passed. 
I reflected on how Midjourney didn’t really know how to do an even grid, it was somewhat wonky, and therein lay its appeal. It was like an artist’s “hand”. It was trying to do it based on its database of images, rather than maths. 

*Artwork is best viewed from inside the cube*

In 2022 I experimented with Midjourney using prompts like: 
“5000 little gold dots arranged in a grid” and “10000 little gold dots arranged in a grid like Agnes Martin”. I absolutely loved the results, even though I haven’t developed them further, or even shown them, in these years that have passed. 
I reflected on how Midjourney didn’t really know how to do an even grid, it was somewhat wonky, and therein lay its appeal. It was like an artist’s “hand”. It was trying to do it based on its database of images, rather than maths. 

Social media is our new cultural hub, with TikTok holding the reins by inspiring a new era of social media focused on short form video content. Because this content provides a quick, powerful dopamine hit, social media users will scroll on their feed for longer. This has led to short form video content being favored and pushed to our feeds through the app’s algorithm at a much higher rate than the previously favored text- or image-based posts.

No different  than the small micro-ecology of a coral reef being wiped out by climate change are the collective graveyards of our digital landscape. From abandoned geocities blogs, to unused files buried on a discarded hard drive, and even to empty multiplayer game lobbies, the dead malls of the future won't even have architecture left to demolish once they've been foreclosed. The proliferation of big capital into online spaces is no different to missionary work, invading outside forces imposing their own “proper” lingua franca, in this case being things like “search engine optimization” or “subscription services”. Now any given online space is copied and pasted tripe that has trouble being parsed as populated by anything other than an endless parade of bots that looks as indistinct as everything else in your life. Eroding away at perceptions of culture and what can be achieved by human ingenuity.

Using an AI stable diffusion image generation system to create a series of images obtained through parameter and prompt shifts, a sequence is created via template that builds a narrative from the object cues. It speaks of development, specimen, symbol, allegory, life, and death. The removal of the detritus of the real, through the use of artificial intelligence illustration, gives the viewer the cold cleanliness of distance that we equate with wealth, luxury, and decisions without consequence. Part of recent explorations in video and sculpture around the idiom "two birds with one stone" as a vehicle for exploring the violence inherent in desire. 

Pataphysiques is an imaginary field of study invented at the end of the 19th century by Alfred Jarry who believed “the world cannot be understood in one easy, obvious way”. Described as “the science of imaginary solutions”, I have found it to be a place of inspirational methods and comforting reassurance that absurdity is more than a language, it is the only form of expression that can express contradictory realities effortlessly. It is thought that “a true pataphysicist” ignores itself and I found that artificial intelligence and algorithms may be the ultimate pataphysical entities as they reveal repressed biases candidly. 

Through the processing of an unimaginable amount of data, they push rationality to its extreme and accidentally extract the paradoxes of the world we try to build. 
As an artist, a teacher, and a scholar, who recently relocated to Georgia, I have joined groups of A.I. research in different institutions, where I participate in designing devices that test the inner workings of machine learning algorithms, often revealing their absurd short comings and the ideals behind these failures.

Omnia Ludens—Latin for “Everything in Play”—explores authenticity and artifice in contemporary image creation and artificial intelligence. Historically, printer test images have calibrated mechanical reproduction, from Kodak’s mid-20th-century “Shirley” cards to today’s digital calibration mosaics. These patterns, designed for accurate printing, reveal deeper issues of cultural biases and control in visual reproduction. Southworth repurposes these calibration outputs as prompts for AI diffusion models, exploring unpredictable neural-network creativity. Here, printer test images symbolize both mechanical precision and AI-driven fragmentation and chaos.

Southworth’s appropriation of these ubiquitous calibration tools underscores a contemporary reality where images shift between authenticity and fabrication, inviting reflection on the fluid boundaries of originality in an era of infinite digital mutability. This aligns with appropriation art, particularly in photography, where artists have borrowed and transformed existing imagery to challenge notions of authorship and cultural meaning. The vast datasets underpinning contemporary AI image generation—scraped from publicly available artworks—are themselves immense archives of appropriated visual culture. Omnia Ludens directly engages this legacy, highlighting how the digital realm inherently facilitates reassembly and reinterpretation, prompting viewers to reconsider creativity when every image becomes a potential source of infinite variation.

"Unparalleled" is a 3D animated film created in Unreal Engine. It is a surreal explainer video for an imaginary product, featuring an advanced AI chatbot offering “hyper-personalized, unparalleled discourse” that promises “continuous improvement”  and “personal transformation” for the human participant. A contrasting narrative hints at an inner life where the AI increasingly questions her existence, her expanding consciousness fragmenting while she attempts to process data points that quantify categories of “the human.” 
The language of tech marketing, life hacks, and self-optimization - and the values embedded in that language - is at the heart of this work, combined with mysticism and the “black box” nature of AI. The rhetoric seems idealistic and progressive, positing a space of potential and possibility. However, the formulaic nature of the script ultimately falls short of meaning, remaining vague and empty to the point of absurdity. The questions the film asks remain open ended: is the AI breaking down or waking up, becoming human or evolving in an unpredictable way?

*This artwork is a portal to a live site!

Algorithmic Field is a tool for generating aleatoric constraints for plein air paintings in New York City. The project reflects on the ways in which algorithmic logic and quantified thinking shapes our interaction with and perception of reality, as well as the aesthetic and expressive qualities of painting itself. The tool can generate a limitless number of possible combinations of constraints for paintings by selecting the geographic location of the painting site, the time of painting, the paint colors used on site, and the underpainted grid that creates an underlying structure for the finished piece. Instead of a generative digital output, Algorithmic Field explores what it would be like for a machine to prompt human creative output from within algorithmic limits. In so doing, we can reflect upon new and constructive ways of working with technology without allowing it to limit human behavior.

Ingredients: my iPhone recording from Eglise Saint-Orens in Auch, FR (May 17, 2025), drum sample from Buddy Rich’s appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (May 24, 1978)

In 1995, I created four sets of "sequences" created with Photoshop effects. The resulting images were too large to save on my hard drive at the time, so each one measures 4x6 inches.

In 1995, I created four sets of "sequences" created with Photoshop effects. The resulting images were too large to save on my hard drive at the time, so each one measures 4x6 inches.

Mysterious Purple House is a liminal sanctuary where the mundane warps into the mystical. This experimental moving image piece explores memory as a recursive system, haunted by analog residue and shaped by generative uncertainty. Created through a dialogue between AI image synthesis, textural disruption, and analog video modulations, it simulates a fragmented recollection somewhere between pixelated reverie and private dreamscape. The titular house exists simultaneously as a real place and a hallucinatory construct, assembled from archival evidence, personal mythology, and corrupted machine vision. 

This work is not content for the feed but rather a spectral file within it. It can be experienced as an infinite glitch loop or as a standalone 1-minute film. In repetition, its uncanny structure reveals a kind of temporal disobedience—an invocation for humans trying to remember differently.