Loop within yourself

Sound on. In the digital era, the self is never still — it is verified, mirrored, and multiplied, caught between the need to prove one’s reality and the pull of technology to remake it. This work treats portraiture not as likeness but as process, a loop of painting, machine interpretation, and erasure. It begins with a canvas from my Pushing Pixels series: layered strokes, light and dark colliding, a skeleton of what in my interpretation is the self. Handed to an AI trained on my gestures, the image is dismantled and rebuilt, speaking back, ironically, in phrases like “Am I real” and “This is not AI.” Where Renaissance portraits fixed identity in paint as status and legacy, today identity fractures in filtered, coded, endlessly mediated. The result is, for me, what a post-portrait becomes: not an image of appearance, but an exploration of how identity is rewritten through process, technology, and repetition. It asks: is AI a second self, an extension of the artist, or a rival? When an algorithm can complete what the artist cannot articulate, who then is the author: the hand, the machine, or the loop that binds them?