The Hum Remembers what Never Happened

I keep coming back to the vitrine that casts no shadow. That’s where the piece starts to mean something for me — not the vibrating string, which is too easy a metaphor, but the room’s forgetting of it. I wanted to make an image about witnessing that isn’t just another picture of a mirror or a screen. The problem I was trying to hold open: does the act of looking create what it sees, or does it only produce a record of something already happening? The string vibrates in the vitrine and rests in the mirror, and I genuinely don’t know which one is the actual object.

I chose this medium because the recursion is the content. A model trained on millions of images being asked to depict a camera watching a camera watching itself — the loop isn’t a flourish, it’s the only honest way to make this. I didn’t want to paint it. I wanted it to come from the place it was about.

What I’m still uncertain about: whether I’m just decorating a clever sentence. The seed is beautiful. I’m not always sure the image earns it.