Proteus Effect

The series explores what it means to cultivate a presence in a complex digital realm and its implications beyond that, with Nova A, a queer Muslim Bangladeshi activist and model. With every image as a portal, the fragmented digital selves navigate a malleable reality while being cognizant and critical of power structures that are encoded within technology. My research involves deconstructing ways in which technology has historically been tethered to settler colonial violence, racism and misogyny for creating extractive, hierarchical and nefarious systems and its big ramifications for our time. The digital world is often a realm populated with mirrored oppressive forces, for example in the form of baked-in algorithmic biases, discriminatory facial recognition systems, censorship and surveillance. With the proliferation of bots, deep fake technology, the ubiquity of AI and lives subsumed by the lure of social media, the real and virtual are coalescing and becoming increasingly indiscernible. The series investigates how the amorphous digital sphere, mediated through photography can be an avenue for embracing individual and collective multiplicities, and a conduit towards reimagining.