2024 MFA THESIS EXHIBITION
PORTS BISHOP
JANUARY 11 - FEBRUARY 23, 2024
“I Want To Be” is a body of work that exists in the liminal space where photography, photo-manipulation, AI-generation and coding, and self-mimicry intersect. Using my own photography as a training set and prompt, I ask the AI to “imagine” photographs that I took 20 years ago documenting a transient, disconnected group of deeply devout American evangelicals. We, the AI and myself, have reimagined these images together, creating a new world in which alien inhabitants can be seen practicing new (alien) forms of worship, adoration, communion, and fervor. The resulting images embody an anxiety about the future-present: this remarkable inflection point in human history during which we are creating an alien life form, an artificial intelligence. In these images the aliens are worshipping at the altar of the very technology they represent. This body of work is unnervingly familiar—grotesque and unsettling. And yet I feel safe in these images.
“I Want To Be” is not merely an intellectual exercise. It’s a deeply personal project about my own salvation story stemming from my interest in and relationship to technology, my love of photographic imagery, and my lifelong obsession with science fiction. As a child, the deporting, otherworldly fantasy stories of science fiction—stories about time travel, alien life, and magical adventure—provided an escape from the relentless challenges presented by my debilitating learning disability. With severe dyslexia, at 10 years old I still was barely able to write my own name, let alone read a book. But I was able to listen, watch, and imagine without restriction. Sci-Fi provided a world where my disability didn’t exist.
After years of grueling study to overcome the worst challenges of dyslexia, in 1995 I received one of the very first voice-to-text computer systems—a technology that transformed my life. Voice-to-text was like magic, the kind of invention that seemed only to be possible in an imagined universe. For the first time, I began to be able to write on my own… at least a little more freely. That technology allowed me to attend university and in turn led to my discovery of photography—a real world that was uncompromised by the limitations of my ongoing struggles to read and write.
I see the images here as a portal to a newly created world. In “I Want To Be,” technology, imagery, and science fiction intersect, the AI is both tool and subject, and I am both the artist and the curator.
Ports Bishop is a transdisciplinary artist and educator. His work fusing art, technology, and sculpture explores non-traditional forms of imagemaking. He is a longtime faculty member of the International Center of Photography in New York City and has been a guest lecturer at New York University Gallatin School and Barnard College at Columbia University. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions worldwide. Notable past exhibitions include Heaven Neither Burning Farther, Lumen Crypt Gallery (London 2022), Organix, Benetton Collection (Italy 2013), Life, Mountain Fold Gallery (New York 2010), and The Dark Fair, Swiss Institute (New York 2008). His photographic work has been published in dozens of international publications including The New York Times Magazine, Vogue Japan, and Vice Magazine. He studied English at Boston University and holds an MFA in Visual Art from MIU.