**Otherness: World, one of twenty-one.**
To make an image is to separate something from itself: to turn continuity into distinction, reality into representation, the self into an image of the self. Images let us build complex societies, shape our environments, assign meaning. The cost is any unabstracted sense of the real.
*“We lose oneness, unity, and our home in the real, but gain the world.”*
— Gideon Jacobs, SPIKE
The history of image synthesis rehearses that exchange at speed. Early models could not resemble anything convincingly, so they produced abstraction instead: unstable, ambiguous, closer to the act of picturing than to the thing pictured. Newer models resemble almost perfectly and refer to almost nothing. The image becomes more real and less true at once. Looking at early AI now, its abstraction may be closer to the real, much as our own early image-making, and even our state of being, once was.
Made in 2021 through early experiments with VQGAN + CLIP, *Otherness* returns five years on in three states. *Oneness* is the non-tokenised print: the whole image, in its right order. *World* consists of twenty-one editions, each a region cut from the image when it sells, chosen not by the buyer but by their wallet. *Fall* is the tokenised protocol through which these states become entangled.
Each *World* is a fragment produced by the act of separation itself. At the moment of sale, the protocol selects a region of the original image and removes it from the whole. That region becomes the artwork: a token paired with a physical print of the exact fragment that left the image.
The collector therefore does not choose what they acquire. Their wallet determines the region. The physical print fixes that moment permanently, while the fragment remains part of the larger system from which it was separated.
There are twenty-one Worlds. Together, they form a distributed image: twenty-one discrete pieces of something that began as one. Each is both an artwork in its own right and evidence of the process through which the original image was divided.
The separation is also what activates *Fall*. When a World leaves the whole, the space it occupied is not simply left blank. It is filled with material from the rest of the image, spliced back in, out of scale and out of place. The more Worlds leave, the more the remainder changes.
Made for ./spiral, an eleven-artist exhibition presented by SuperRare at Fondazione Aversano, New York, September 2026, curated by Atay Ilgun and Jonathan Carmel. Each artist was asked to return to a formative work, tool or unresolved idea, on one condition: that the return not be a repetition.
Proceeds from this work support IKLECTIK’s artistic programme and operations.
