This is a little art experiment using AI-generated images to play with themes of love, romance, the politics of queer identity, and aging.
I’m working with the idea of what it means to embody someone’s desire, and how that dynamic changes when the body of a loved one is perceived as a hardware vessel for the software of the spirit. From one perspective, the young man in the photos has many lovers … but I prefer to believe he has only one, and that, while the hardware changes and evolves over time, the soul of his companion remains consistent, regardless of its outer form.
This is, of course, the case with the bodies of our flesh-and-blood partners, too, who change so slowly from day to day, we hardly notice their evolution. But photographs reveal the truth: our lover’s body today is not the same as our lover’s body from years ago. The hardware changes; the soul persists.
And on we go together: from the heady days of young love, through romance, through declaring ourselves a couple, through the creation of a family, through the aging of our children, through illness … until death does us part.
When I first began creating these images, I was taken with the harsh juxtaposition of flesh and chrome; later, I found myself drawn more and more to the message that love transcends barriers of all kinds.
