Bad New Days
Because I have hereditary macular degeneration, I often had to undergo eye examinations as a child—a process that was both terrifying and unsettling for me. My eyeballs would be held in a metal frame, while the doctor directed an intense, flashlight-like beam into my eyes for what felt like ten long minutes. Occasionally, younger doctors would be invited to observe. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them speaking in professional English, discussing my eye images with curiosity. Years later, as a creator, I realized that when my peers and I gather around an artwork for discussion, it is not unlike those doctors studying my eyes. There’s an internal logic to both situations—an order that makes sense only to those who understand it. For outsiders, these images convey no clear message at all. In this project, I aim to blend these two kinds of photography: medical and artistic. I’ve taken fundus photography—images of the interior of the eye—and used AI to transform them into something “art-like.” The result is deliberately ambiguous, making these images meaningless in both medical and artistic contexts. The project’s title, Bad New Days, is borrowed from Hal Foster’s book of the same name, in which he explores how art grapples with a world of looming crises and emergencies. To me, the experience of an eye exam reflects this sense of foreboding—a world in which meaning becomes blurred, and we are left searching for clarity in places that resist it.