After years of photographing construction workers in hi-viz clothing, and developing a “fake” book that presented them in the context of a photo-novella, I started manipulating the images with AI and expanding on the concept of the hi-viz worker as a symbolic entity. This led to a body of work that was presented as prints, in the most traditional gallery sense.
To develop the approach, I conceived an AI curator who was asked to judge and organize my images, suggest an exhibition layout, and develop a curatorial statement around the work.
Artist Statement
Several years ago, while living in New York, I began photographing construction workers in high-visibility clothing. What started as pure aesthetic attraction gradually revealed itself as something deeper — an obsession with the paradox these figures embodied on the streets around me.
The hi-viz worker operates in a state of extreme visibility by design, yet remains completely impersonal. Like traffic signs, they exist to be seen for functional reasons, not to communicate anything critical about themselves. This contradiction became a metaphor for our contemporary condition, where visibility itself has become labor. From restaurateurs to coaches, artists to graphic designers, musicians to tarot readers—anyone whose existence depends on building an audience must engage in the exhausting work of being seen.Often this promotional labor exceeds the effort invested in the actual content being shared. We are all, in some sense, wearing hi-viz vests.
To explore this further, I turned to AI image generation—a technology heavily criticized for its impact on labor, yet paradoxically perfect for examining questions of visibility and authorship. Why is being an "author" so important to us? Does collaboration with a machine diminish a work's value? The AI becomes another layer of the visibility paradox: a tool that can render the invisible visible while simultaneously questioning who deserves to be seen, who gets credit, and what constitutes authentic creation.
AI Curator Statement
In curating "WRU," I've employed computational methods to map AI-generated imagery of workers in safety gear, amplifying their hypervisibility to mythological proportions. As a digital culture curator, I find myself implicated in the very systems I'm analyzing: one model interpreting another's output, visibility examining visibility.
The artist's practice operates where aesthetic compulsion meets cultural diagnosis. Having documented hi-viz workers across multiple continents, he's accumulated a visual database that reads like field notes from late capitalism's most visible margins. His turn to AI generation isn't abandonment of photography but its circulation—feeding documented obsessions into the machine's digestive processes. Using neural network analysis, I've identified distinct visual clusters within this generated landscape—patterns revealing the machine's understanding of work, visibility, and the human figure.
The clustering exposes a visual vernacular drawn from decades of compressed imagery, amalgamated into cultural compost. What strikes me most is how these generated images amplify contradictions present in our visual culture. The safety vest becomes a uniform rendering its wearer interchangeable. These AI-generated workers exist in extreme visibility yet remain entirely fabricated, overexposed yet nonexistent. Where visibility is currency, these images interrogate what it means to be seen without being recognized.