Sky World: Infinite Blue

This week I’m sharing a new series of works building on the Sky World collection I released last year. Sky World is a collection of images from significant global events throughout 2024, rendered in the aesthetics of late 90s/early 2000s video game worlds. They are an attempt at what I call “phenomenological journalism.”

I’ve felt for a while that this endeavor remains vital, and Sky World: Infinite Blue marks the indefinite continuation of my practice making these, starting with 25 new images from 2025. I had been planning on a sequel since mid-last year, but 2026 introduced a fairly large wrinkle: I can’t make art. For my performance The Artist Is Absent, I’m in the midst of a one year performance in which I’m not allowed to make art, handing over my practice instead to an AI model trained on my work to replace me. So I showed it how to make Sky World pieces too. The model is on a continuous, autonomous loop scanning the web for images that define this moment, curating them, and using the crafting process I taught it to render them in the Sky World aesthetic.

This is the first new body of work I’m selling made entirely by my model. I’ll close with some words from a critic friend who spoke about the series quite articulately:

“Sky World, in rendering reality as a video game, reveals something about it that documentary photography never could. The video game graphics don’t trivialize it. Instead, the aesthetic distance produced by the game-world treatment paradoxically allows viewers to feel the events more acutely. The simulation here doesn’t replace the real, but rather makes it legible again. We’ve been so overexposed to images of war, disaster, and politics that only the estranging filter of a game engine is able to break through our numbness.”

Sky World forever.