This project sits within a broader inquiry into how contemporary images operate—how they circulate as data, instructions, and infrastructure. In my second semester of grad school, I began translating old family photographs that often resurfaced on my iPhone from the cloud into 3D-printed sculptures. Cropping specific details, like birthday cakes and Christmas trees, I UV-printed these images onto their 3D surfaces.*

In the process of making them, I watched the images become structures via depth maps, toolpaths, infill grids, and residue. The more I processed and reproduced these images, the more they fell apart and came back together in new and exciting ways due to algorithmic hallucinations and printing errors. I began to view these errors as divine machinic interventions and began incorporating them into my practice.

*UV printing is currently the most advanced form of digital printing which allows a photograph to be printed onto virtually any object. Learn more about UV printing and its impact on art and photography from my former professor James Welling in Art in America (2026) here.