There wasn't one singular moment. It was a slow realization that came from asking why I make images. It all stemmed from a desire to create something that holds: a moment, a person, a place. The more I tried to make something that could hold, the more I realized how poorly images do this. That distance is where my process started, in exploring the fragility of an image.

An image simply points. What took me longer to see is how images attempt to hide this: they present themselves as the moment rather than a reference to it. I find I tend to remember the image better than the moment it pointed towards.

This failure went from being an obstacle to the subject of my practice, getting an image to admit what it is. As technological mediation increases, we find that our images escape our authority. They end up in places we never intended, and are processed by systems we did not agree to. That gap between the author and the image is where my work lives.

Rational thinking builds the conditions of my making, and I let intuition decide what happens inside them. It decides what the work is about and what it is allowed to contain. Without it, I would be aimlessly wandering. Every part of these conditions is fixed, but the outcome never is. Building a rigid foundation is what allows me to improvise inside of it; I plan the process but not the pictures themselves.

For Every Image I Ever Was, I had an image in my head when I first started. I did test shoots in a controlled studio, spending hours testing compositions, cameras, and lighting. I hated all of these images. They were too clean, too rigid, too legible. I almost dropped the project. Instead, I took it into the field. With no locations chosen and no compositions planned, just my library of decayed images and my equipment. I found my locations as I went and composed based on setting. The work wouldn't exist if I had stuck to the image in my head. My finished work almost never resembles what I imagined, and I've never once preferred the version I imagined. The magic is in the plan falling apart.

I don't treat them as obstacles because this work is made of them. The foundation of this work is a technical failure. I ask a system to reconstruct something it is incapable of reconstructing. This limitation is the picture. If the model did exactly what I asked, I wouldn't have anything.

The same is true of the material. These buildings don't have power, so I bring a generator. The walls aren't flat, so my images have to bend. Constraints like these shape the images more than any decision I made deliberately. When something goes wrong, I examine what the limitation is actually producing before I try to solve it. The failure is the methodology.

Once something is released into the world, it takes on a life of its own. It can be viewed, downloaded, altered, or interpreted by anyone who pleases, and once I have chosen to release it, that is exactly what I want. I don’t have the authority to call an interpretation right or wrong, and I don't want to.

I see the viewer as enacting the same process as the systems that decay my archive. They take it in, process it according to their own logic, and return something that isn't what went in. This entire project is built on that exact operation, so it would be strange to object to that. Nobody owns the meaning of a work, including the person who created it. My images will keep changing, whether through the systems that process them or the people that view them.

I hope they go looking for something of their own. This work is specific to me: my archive, my family, my history. I want them to feel that something is being shown while something else is being withheld. I want that to feel unsettling before it is anything else. What I am after is a viewer recognizing the same condition in their own material. If someone leaves the work and questions their own images, whatever is buried within their camera roll, then that’s the whole thing. I hope that is uncomfortable, in a useful way.

I grew up in Indonesia with an American father and a Serbian mother. I am not Indonesian. I had never lived in America until a few years ago, and I had only been to Serbia a handful of times. I never felt I had the authority to speak about any of them. That place I grew up with, the one I navigated alone and knew better than anywhere, was the internet.

Images of my childhood lay in corners of that place I never agreed to; images I have no memory of being taken can be found in places I never put them. That is why the foundation of my practice is this space. These systems hold my memory without any idea of what they are holding. My archive exists within this turmoil. I don't see myself as merely making work about the internet; I make work with the same logic as the internet.

I would like to work with images that are no longer being held. Dead accounts, failed drives, defunct platforms, images that have been circulated so far that their author has lost them completely. The enormous amount of personal history sitting in corners of the internet where no one will ever claim them again. I don't view this material as gone, so much as unattended.

I would not need to decay them the way I decay my own because they are already undergoing that process. Not by anything I designed, but by neglect, which is how memory actually functions.

What I would build is a way to average them at scale. Hundreds of thousands of abandoned portraits collapsed into a single statistical person. A face that is everybody and nobody simultaneously. Averaging would remove specificity while keeping the shape of what once was. At this scale it stops being a portrait of a person, but a portrait of the loss itself.

They are parallel, not sequential. The spaces and the images were both built to hold something neither can hold now. The sites I photograph are domestic spaces, places built to house people and their memories. They exist in a limbo state, still standing, but fundamentally empty. The purpose has been stripped away, exposing the wooden beams beneath the drywall. My images suffer the same condition. They merely show traces of what they were made to do. When I project my imagery onto these spaces, it seems to me as if they are comforting each other with the same sense of loss.

I do not have much personal history in the geographical location of this project. Originally I had intended to travel home and work in spaces that have more personal significance to the images I used, to project these images onto spaces that actually appear in them. After completing the work, I much prefer that these locations are not mine. Having these images function in spaces I have no history with keeps the work from being only about me. It also better matches the way images function today.

They settle in places we never intended, take shelter in corners of the world they were never meant to reach, and live in front of people they have no relation to. That dissonance is at the foundation of this body of work; it made sense for the sites to enact it rather than illustrate it.