Frequently Asked Questions

Where have you been for the last ten years?

Good question.

The short answer is: living a life.

The longer answer is that I stepped away from exhibiting and producing work publicly, but I never really stopped thinking about the questions that underpin my practice. In fact, the world rather inconveniently spent the last decade proving they were worth continuing to ask.

When I first began researching mediated presence, video calls were still something of a novelty, AI was mostly science fiction, and social media hadn't yet become the infrastructure of everyday life. Since then we've all lived through a pandemic, learned to socialise through screens, become accustomed to algorithmically curated identities, and started collaborating with machines that can generate text, images and entire worlds.

So, while I was away, the future caught up.

So... what's your work about now?

Many of the questions remain the same.

How can we be present somewhere we're not? What happens to relationships when they're mediated through technology? Where does the performance end when it continues indefinitely as documentation, conversation, archive and algorithm?

These questions have become less speculative and more descriptive. Mediated presence is no longer an exception—it's the default.

Didn't philosophers already talk about this?

Of course.

Plato was suspicious of representations. Later, media theorists like Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin explored remediation and the ways media continually reshape one another.

I'm interested in what those ideas look like now, when our identities are fragmented across devices, platforms, conversations, archives and increasingly, artificial intelligence.

So is this still performance art?

Yes. Sort of.

Performance is still at the centre of my practice, but I'm less interested in a singular live event than in what happens afterwards. A performance now exists simultaneously as an action, a recording, a memory, a screenshot, a repost, a dataset, an AI training image and someone's half-remembered anecdote.

The work doesn't finish. It mutates.

What does your practice look like?

It moves between text, image, sound, moving image, performance and generative media.

Rather than treating these as separate disciplines, I think of them as different ways of examining the same phenomenon: how we construct ourselves through mediation, and how those constructions continue to exist independently of us.

So what are you trying to find out?

Whether "presence" and "absence" still make sense as opposites.

Imagine we're sitting together in the same room. Now imagine we're speaking through a screen from opposite sides of the world. The conversation can be equally immediate, equally meaningful. At the same time, we're both physically elsewhere, digitally present, permanently archived and continuously represented by systems that persist long after we've logged off.

Presence has become distributed.

Absence has become... complicated.

And finally...

Ten years ago I asked:

How many pockets are you in today?

Today, I'd probably ask:

How many versions of you are circulating while you're busy being this one?