The Grand Tour series derives from a profound and personal unease with how we see (and how we are increasingly seen by) algorithmic systems.

These works began not as political statements, but as emotional responses to the strange melancholy of AI-generated imagery: its uncanny ability to synthesize “beauty” while remaining fundamentally hollow, its capacity to mimic human longing while never truly understanding what it means to yearn for distant places and a different life elsewhere.

The Ache of Artificial Memory

Working with AI trained on centuries of travel imagery (artists’ notebooks, sketches) and texts (memories, diaries, letters), I discovered something unexpected: the machine's attempts to recreate human wanderlust produced fragments that felt both familiar and alien— landscapes that seemed to remember places they had never been, faces that carried expressions they could never feel.

This strange pathos became the emotional core of the series. The fragmentary outputs (interrupted geometries, half-formed faces, landscapes dissolving into digital static) mirror something essential about memory itself: how we reconstruct the past from incomplete data, how nostalgia operates through omission as much as recall. The machine's failures became more interesting than its successes, revealing the ghost-like quality of all mediated experience.

Resistance Through Tenderness

My resistance to pure algorithmic generation isn't ideological, but visceral. The touch of pencil on paper, the weight of ink, the physical act of traversing large surfaces with my whole body: these gestures feel necessary in an age of disembodied interaction. Not as statements about authenticity, but as forms of self-care, ways of staying present and thoughtful in a world designed for distraction.

The slow, iterative process becomes a form of mourning for ways of seeing we are losing, for forms of attention that digital culture erodes, for the quiet spaces between thought and action that algorithms increasingly colonize.

Each work emerges through hundreds of small acts of resistance: choosing this fragment over that one, letting the hand wander where the machine would optimize, preserving interesting accidents that efficiency would eliminate.

Synthetic Ruins

The "Grand Tour" tradition fascinates me not for its politics but for its psychology: the peculiar human need to seek meaning through displacement, to find ourselves by getting lost, to touch the past through its ruins. Contemporary AI systems exhibit a similar compulsion, endlessly recombining visual elements from human culture, searching for patterns that might constitute understanding. But where historical travelers returned with sketches that carried the trace of lived experience, AI generates images that simulate experience without ever having lived it.

These drawings attempt to bridge that gap, to restore something like lived experience to synthetic vision through remixing of digital detritus and the slow accumulation of manual marks.

Digital Melancholia

There's a particular sadness to how AI processes cultural memory, flattening centuries of human expression into statistical relationships, reducing the complexity of lived experience to automated pattern recognition.

The fragmentary nature of the generated material reflects this loss: broken mythologies, interrupted narratives, cultural DNA degraded through endless digital reproduction.

Working with these fragments becomes an act of archaeological care: not trying to restore some original meaning, but finding new forms of beauty in the ruins of computational vision. The large-scale drawings create spaces for contemplation that screen-based media cannot provide: physical encounters that demand time, attention, presence.

The Poetry of Glitches

What moves me most about AI-generated imagery isn't its ability to mimic human ingenuity, but its revelatory failures: moments when the algorithm's limitations create accidental poetry: hallucinations, mistakes and glitches seem to reveal something profound about the difference between calculation and imagination.

My manual interventions in each work don't "correct" these failures but amplify their strangeness, creating hybrid forms that belong neither to human nor machine vision. These are not utopian fantasies about human-AI collaboration, but honest explorations of what it feels like to create in the age of algorithms.

Spaces of Wonder

In a culture obsessed with productivity and optimization, the Grand Tour works propose something radical: uselessness. They serve no algorithmic function, generate no data, optimize nothing. They exist simply to be encountered, to create moments of pause in a world designed for acceleration.

The physical presence of these works (their scale, their materiality, their resistance to digital reproduction) creates islands of slowness in streams of information. They invite viewers not to instantly consume but to wander, to get lost in textures and forms that exist nowhere else.

Alternative Intimacies

Rather than imagining different technological futures, these works explore different ways of being present with technology: approaches based on curiosity rather than efficiency, wonder rather than utility, care rather than extraction.

They suggest that resistance might be less about opposing systems and more about finding spaces for different kinds of attention within them.

The series asks not "How can we overthrow algorithmic culture?" but "How can we remain human within it?" The answer, I've discovered, lies not in manifestos but in the accumulation of small gestures: the weight of paper, the resistance of pigment, the time it takes to truly see who we have been, who we are now, and who we might become.