Jeremy Starn - Unnatural Nature

Nature photography can be seen as a desire to capture the wild. To tame the weird. However, by flattening the roundness of reality, the thorniness of being is stripped. What is learned from a flattened world? What happens when pictures of "Nature" misbehave? After heavy color manipulation, I cut, collage, and sculpt photographs of nature into immersive installations. Creating sites of entanglement, I use viewer activated elements ranging from live AI generated images to motion triggered lighting to bring viewers into new photographic worlds. I am interested in the tension felt when experiencing three-dimensional sensations built from flat surfaces.

Attending to photography as a human tool for control, my work re-imagines relations with the nonhuman. Applying methodologies of queer ecology, this series treats photographs as uncontainable, codependent, evolving beings, allowing images to emerge as themselves. What new worlds take root when photos resist their ideological function to capture and instead become their own?

Telephone Sound: Live AI generated voice responding to existential questions of self, photography, and 'Nature'. Each phone activation (pick-up) produced further AI exploration of the questions.

Background Audio: Distorted Asexual Katydids