ARTIST STATEMENT

About a year ago, I got the call. My older brother was unconscious, bleeding from his brain, and I needed to find my own way down to Georgia to see him. For the next month, I spent every day alone with him in the hospital, sitting in silence for hours. Not knowing when or if he was going to wake up. When or if he was going to be okay. When or if he would be the same. This period of my life was filled with uncertainty and a complete loss of control.

During this time, I found peace by hiking throughout Georgia in solitude. Observing the fractalized patterns found in nature gave me a sense of familiarity as I remembered the childhood trails my brother and I once explored together. I thought about other loved ones I had hiked with, the intimate conversations we shared, and the support system I had unknowingly built through these experiences in nature.

Later in the year, as my brother began to recover physically, I realized that I was still processing the trauma of what had happened. Winter had arrived, and with it came the resurfacing of darker childhood memories— memories of my family abandoning me throughout my life, especially during holidays. Memories of my brothers beating me as a teenager. Memories of the fear of abandonment that shaped my childhood slowly crept back into my life. These fears began to consume me, leaving me feeling lost and confused. During this period of intense emotion, I found myself craving that same sense of familiarity and support once again.

Because of how still and lifeless Indiana feels during the winter, I began exploring vast worlds of 3D fractals. I became drawn to a particular fractal form that reminded me of a field of flowers, offering a sense of comfort and a space to explore my emotions. Using artificial intelligence and a single photograph of flowers, I generated a landscape of a never-ending, blooming field. This process resulted in a meditative video work that brought me the same sense of familiarity and support I had been longing for, and helped me begin processing my trauma.

Smell the Roses is a meditative video art piece that invites participants to take a break from the demands of everyday life— to lay down, breathe, and explore their own thoughts and feelings. The work also engages with current conversations surrounding the ethics of artificial intelligence, proposing a quiet, contemplative way of integrating the technology into an artistic practice.

PROCESS & TECHNICAL APPROACH

Smell the Roses was developed through a hybrid digital workflow that combines authored environments with generative image processing. Rather than using artificial intelligence to generate imagery from prompts, the project begins with a single photographic source and a series of visual structures created and animated by the artist. These materials were developed using Mandelbulber for 3D fractal environments, ProGamerGov’s Neural Style Transfer code and EbSynth for iterative image transformation, and Adobe Premiere Pro for sequencing and final video composition. Together, these tools establish the visual boundaries of the work and define the range of transformation that follows.

Generative systems were introduced as a means of reprocessing this authored material over time. Through iterative use of neural style transfer, the source imagery was repeatedly transformed, reintroduced, and re-sequenced, producing evolving visual states that retain traces of the original photograph while resisting visual resolution. Individual outputs were selectively edited and composed into a final video form, maintaining control over pacing, duration, and presentation. Within this process, AI functions as a constrained system operating within authored parameters rather than as an autonomous creator, allowing repetition, instability, and gradual transformation to emerge through structure rather than invention.