I make paintings about the systems that now sit between us and the rest of our lives, the systems that mediate love, sex, work, family, politics and sometimes our own interiority. A programmer for many years and a CTO in tech and startups, I have been in board rooms as we gamify attention and engineer more clicks. The paintings are my thoughts about this expressed without words.

I work in layers. I build a ground on board or canvas, or start with a line etched into tile, then scrape, wash and dissolve until forms appear. I might attack an existing painting with an oil stick, or work a small tile for a day with brush pens until a landscape resolves. The process is physical and gestural and it often feels like the material is guiding me; it is automatic. I sometimes get a sense that I’m working with the material to discover what should already be there.

I photograph the work and feed it through a generative pipeline, which misreads the marks and renders figuration that promises more on the screen but when printed, is always less. I sometimes embed this in clear gesso and respond in oil, acrylic, ink or photoshop. Sometimes I use a laser to burn away my marks with the AI-Slop. I call it algorithmic frottage: my mind rubbing against a statistical model.

My practice began as master’s research into emergent narrative at Glasgow School of Art and then prompt engineering within a fine art practice at Central Saint Martins and has come as a surprise to me. I thought I’d make digital work but instead, have become enchanted by materiality.

• Luciana Parisi — for thoughts
• Issa Samb — for objects and deep-time
• Lisa O’Neill — for lyricism
• Zanele Muholi — for fearlessness
• Alfred Gell — for art anthropology