In Me Kissing Me, the artist on a desolate black background is in a slow, romantic kiss with himself. Over time, the suggestively queer couple becomes augmented and perverted by AI translation, seamlessly transforming the artist and his double into various cinematic lovers, religious idols, political celebrities, and uncanny creatures. Here the self is quite literally projected into the articial, pointing to the way we see ourselves in ctional images and the isolating nature of that tendency. Beneath the AI-generated romances, the underlying video of the artist kissing himself gently fades in and out, making the process of AI image translation visible and reminding the viewer of the articial nature of the generated romance.

These augmentations have the potential to be incredibly beautiful but can also feel quite shallow, like a thin, seductive veneer that obscures the identity of the original. In that sense, they become illustrative of our increasingly mediated relationship to reality in the digital era. One gets a sense of the way AI will stand between the authentic “original” and our perception of it, especially with the specter of AR and VR technologies on the horizon.