Psychic Telephone

Psychic Telephone is a collaboration between visual artist Danielle Ezzo and author Marin Sardy, who over the last several years interviewed seven subjects about their psychic experiences and made text and images loosely inspired by their lives.

Psychic Telephone is a collaboration between New York-based visual artist Danielle Ezzo and Santa Fe-based author Marin Sardy, who over the last three years interviewed seven subjects about their psychic experiences. The series begins with Sardy's conversations with the psychics, which are distilled into written pieces capturing the essence of each subject's encounters, as well as, her own permeable understanding of the known world.

The texts are then shared with Danielle who uses machine learning to interpret the stories, providing her with low-resolution, highly speculative synthetic images. Danielle establishes a set of perimeters that employ older, imprecise models to create a workflow that leans more into the associative rather than the hyperreal, uncanny images produced by current-day AI. We see familiar visual themes and archetypes surface in the conjuring of images from text: anonymous faces and bodies, amorphous flora and fauna, and strange juxtapositions of objects in a kind of technological version of the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse. Danielle contends with the limits of vision by using the dataset as an expression of collective consciousness. This allows a playful, interpretative quality to emerge in the image-generation process. She then prints out these images, using them as a catalyst for camera-made photographs.

Together, Marin and Danielle use a generative approach to working with the source material, iterating and responding to one another as a way of priming their relationship for a flow state to materialize. The title of the series originates from the phenomenon where you think of someone and then they call you. It’s about the connection between people over distances. The collaboration establishes a throughline between synchronicity, curiosity, the bounds of what can be seen and known, and the otherworldly.

Psychic Telephone serves as a modest tear in the fabric of reality and a commentary on creativity both mediated and invigorated by technology. It poses questions about how our relationship to the divine has evolved in the digital age, and how the interplay between human experience, artistic interpretation, and technological intervention shapes our perception.