semipermeable: syringe (2024)

Overview

Generative AI inherits the same political and epistemological infrastructures that regulate bodies, borders and viral life. Working inside these systems, the piece confronts the inability of commercial image models to imagine the HIV epidemic unfolding across the US/Mexico borderlands, where the virus disproportionately affects Hispanic and Latino communities through overlapping regimes of migration, healthcare, surveillance and state violence. Their refusals, distortions and hallucinations become the material of the work. These synthetic images circulate through custom audiovisual software where recursive processing transforms computational failure into an unstable field of contamination, desire and sensation.