Ecologies of Noise
Ecologies of Noise is my latest body of work that brings together mediums I’ve used over time in my practice, like painting, photography, AI, and coding. It is a research based project where the final work takes on a sculptural form, by painting the resulting images onto screens that I physically arrange.
I start by gathering photographs of nature that show some of the most endangered ecosystems affected by global warming, which I find online under Creative Commons licenses. Each photo becomes an input to an image-to-image AI generator. The AI produces an output, and my custom coded program takes that output and feeds it back as the next input, repeating the same loop hundreds of times. Early on, the landscape begins to shift through the process: details drop out and the scene becomes gradually unrecognizable. As iterations progress, the image collapses into a minimal color field. I call these final frames “end images.” These final frames are not abstractions in the modernist sense of purification. They are the exhausted remains of a process that has consumed its referent.
The loop is a direct visualization of the effects of model collapse, a term used in computer science to describe how AI outputs can degrade when they keep feeding on synthetic material, with each new output turning flatter, more repetitive, and drifting back toward the initial state of AI-generated images, which is noise.
Print installation at the group show Collapse: data.models.worlds, curated by Daphne Dragona and Katerina Goutziouli, Athens, Greece
As a second step, I take those “end images” and paint them onto screens, TVs, monitors, tablets, and phones, sourced from a recycling company. Underneath their smooth surfaces sits a material paradox. Screens are often spoken of as dematerialization, yet they are among the most materially dense cultural forms we have: mineral, chemical, logistical, electrical. Devices engineered for refresh, update, and endless substitution are converted into fixed panels carrying a single final frame. I use these screens purely as physical supports in a salvage-based practice as if in a meta-technological scenario shifting the focus from their use as an interface to their materiality. By painting a single final image on each screen I am also canceling their functionality and in a metaphorical way, addressing my own feeling of screen fatigue while simultaneously shifting the object’s status from interface to artifact. Our most intimate aesthetic experiences are now brokered by devices whose primary logic is capture, extraction, and circulation, I'm subverting that by using a manual and historically charged way of image production: painting.
The work nods to the assumption that the more we rely on AI to mediate cultural production, the less powerful it may become because of model collapse, and eventually we may fall into a precarious stage where technology has passed its peak era, our skills have been atrophied and the natural environment has also suffered irreversible damage. What does this vicious cycle of exhaustion look like when cultural technology begins to cannibalize itself at scale?
To find out more about the reaserch and process scroll down
Ecologies of Noise, Assemblage 1, 2025, oil painting on screens, dimensions : 60 x 50 cm
Ecologies of Noise, Assemblage 2, 2025, oil painting on screens, dimensions : 67 x 61 cm
Ecologies of Noise, Assemblage 3, 2025, oil painting on screens, dimensions : 67 x 53 cm
Ecologies of Noise, Assemblage 4, 2025, oil painting on screens, dimensions : 52 x 60 cm
Ecologies of Noise, Assemblage 5, 2025, oil painting on screens, dimensions : 60 x 52 cm
Ecologies of Noise, Assemblage 6, 2025, oil painting on screens, dimensions : 70 x 53 cm
Ecologies of Noise, Assemblage 7, 2025, oil painting on screens, ( 2 computer screens, 2 tablets and 4 phones ) dimensions : 66 x 93 cm
DETAIL
DETAIL
Upcoming new works
Assemblage 8, 2026, oil painting on screens, ( tv, computer screen, tablet and phone) dimensions : 53 x 89 cm
Assemblage 9, 2026, oil painting on screens, ( 4 tvs ) dimensions : 144 x 250 cm
Assemblage 10, 2026, oil painting on screens, ( 9 screens ) dimensions : 160 cm x 75 cm
Research Part
Ecologies of noise has been a research based project resulting in many pages of notes, ideas and comments that resulted from my longstanding interest about AI’s impact on cultural flattening as well as the effects of technology’s hardware on the environment. This podcast has been created by feeding NotebookLM AI with all my research material and then edited down by me.
Installation proposal of prints showing the 500 feedback loops for the input images below. Each print is 1 x 5 m.
Input images: photos of endangered ecosystems found online under Creative Commons Licence
Example of input image no.6 (from the image above) run by a custom coded feedback loop for a hundered iterations through an image-to-image AI
Example of input image no.7 looped through an image-to-image AI for a hundered iterations.
Print installation at the group show Collapse: data.models.worlds, curated by Daphne Dragona and Katerina Goutziouli, Athens, Greece
500 recursive iterations starting from the image below
