Psychic Telephone

A collaboration with Marin Sardy exploring psychic encounters through interviews and photography. Ezzo employs AI as an ice-breaking tool to create camera-made photographs to examine the interplay between human experience, creativity, and perception.

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 conjuring of images from text: anonymous faces and bodies and strange juxtapositions of objects in a kind of 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.

Marin and Danielle use a generative approach as a way of priming their relationship for a flow state to materialize. It questions 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.