As an artist who continues to work predominantly with found physical materials, how do you define "new media"? How did you first start working with digital media?

I define "new media" as a product of its time—the 1980s and ’90s, when digital technology was still novel, not yet the all-encompassing force it is today. It represented a frontier where art and emerging tools intersected: kinetic sculptures driven by code, video synthesized from early computers, and interactive installations. Today, the term feels nostalgic, but back then, it was a radical reimagining of creativity.  

My own journey into digital media began with the first wave of home computing. By age 12 (1982), I had an Atari 800, and like many in my generation, I was immersed in the language of pixels and code. Yet schools still clung to typewriters, so my artistic roots grew elsewhere—in darkrooms and photography clubs. When I later studied at the Ontario College of Art, I found traditional photography instruction lagging behind what I already knew. That’s when I discovered their "New Media" program, which fused art with technology. Suddenly, I was building kinetic sculptures controlled by parallel ports, and photography became a secondary pursuit.  

Paradoxically, my work returned to the physical material of photography—perhaps because the digital world had become so ubiquitous. But my time in that early digital landscape permanently shaped how I see creativity: not as a divide between analog and digital, but as a continuum where tools, old or new, serve the same endless curiosity. 

Looking at your work, one can see how digital image production is often juxtaposed or confronted with classic film material. What makes this hybridity interesting for you?

Photography is a fractured medium—caught between its physical past and its dematerialised present, often trapped in a silo of its own making. The art world treats it as a self-contained ecosystem, with its own fairs, museums, and gatekeepers. While I respect that tradition, I’ve also felt its limitations. A gallerist once dismissed my work as “not photography,” and that moment crystallized something for me: the medium’s boundaries are often policed more rigidly than its possibilities are explored.  

That’s why hybridity fascinates me. Some claim there’s no difference between film and digital—that an image is an image. But to me, the processes are as distinct as baking bread versus 3D-printing it (admittedly, my analogies need work). The materiality matters. A glass plate, a celluloid negative, a JPEG—each carries the DNA of its creation. When I juxtapose them, I’m not just mixing tools; I’m staging a conversation across time.  Digital and analog photography are different languages. One is instant, malleable, infinitely reproducible; the other is physical, slow, bound to chemistry and chance. By colliding them, I want to question what photography is now—not as a purist’s craft, but as a living, evolving practice. The tension between the two isn’t just technical; it’s philosophical. And that’s where things get interesting.

Another striking aspect of your series is the way power dynamics are present even in the most mundane images. Could you elaborate on this attitude?

What fascinates me is how photography—even at its most casual—is never neutral. It’s a medium shaped by access, privilege, and the unconscious biases of its time. The canon of photography overwhelmingly represents those with the means to participate: the wealthy hobbyists, the connected professionals. But these power dynamics persist even in vernacular photography, where they become more insidious precisely because they appear so ordinary.  

Take eBay, which I treat as an accidental archive. Scroll through listings of old negatives, and you’ll notice two glaring absences: non-white subjects and non-white photographers. It’s not just that  portraits of White families dominate the marketplace—it’s that images of Black or Brown individuals holding cameras are nearly nonexistent. I don’t believe this is a coincidence; it’s a reflection of who had access to photography, who felt entitled to document their lives, and what survives as "history."  

Every snapshot is a double record: of what’s shown, and of what the frame excludes. A family picnic photo might seem innocuous, but its very existence speaks to leisure time, disposable income, and the cultural permission to claim space in the visual record. In projects like Those Who Hear the Ticking, I try to highlight how photography doesn’t just witness power—it enacts it, quietly reinforcing who gets to be seen and who gets to look.  

The question isn’t just what we see in old photographs, but why we see it. The answers are always about more than aesthetics—they’re about economics, race, gender, and the unspoken rules of who gets to control the narrative.

In your opinion, how has photography as a medium changed the way we think about identity as a notion or concept?

Photography revolutionized identity by making it negotiable. Before its invention, our visual representation was filtered through an artist's hand - a flattering interpretation for those who could afford it. But photography introduced something radical: a mechanical eye that promised (however deceptively) objective truth.

Consider Queen Victoria, who essentially became the first modern monarch by understanding photography's power. In the 1840s, her image circulated as progressively distorted engravings - a royal game of telephone where each copy drifted further from reality. When photography arrived, she seized control of her image, exchanging stiff royal portraits for informal family photos that recast her as both sovereign and relatable mother. This wasn't just image-making; it was identity engineering on an imperial scale.

As a former newspaper photographer, I witnessed how this awareness trickled down to everyday power players. Politicians would transform when they spotted a camera, performing their public selves with conscious precision. The paradox? While most now carefully curate their photographic identities, I've always hated being photographed - perhaps because I know too well how a single frame can flatten or distort who we really are.

Photography didn't just document identity; it made identity something we could consciously construct, manipulate, and project. The medium gave us both a mirror and a mask - and we've been negotiating between them ever since.

Could you describe your workflow in more detail? Where do you typically source your vernacular materials, and are there particular sites or archives you frequent for this purpose? (Would you describe yourself primarily as a collector or as an archivist?)

I'm a collector by nature - it's in my blood. My father spent decades amassing WWII artifacts with dreams of starting a museum, and while that never materialized, I inherited both his passion for preservation and his intuitive approach. My archive grows through what I call "serendipitous archaeology." eBay is my primary dig site, but I also comb through antique shops and street markets, drawn to images that make me pause mid-scroll or stop me in my tracks. These aren't methodical acquisitions - they're emotional responses to photographs that contain some unresolved tension, like a sentence cut off mid-thought. Vernacular photography fascinates me precisely because these "ordinary" images are often extraordinary in what they reveal (or conceal).

Workflow varies by project. Some, like The Children of Mars, emerge from pre-grouped negatives in my archive - clusters waiting for their context. Others, like Those Who Hear the Ticking, develop more organically, with images finding each other through visual echoes and thematic resonances. The archive is constantly active in my mind - less like a filing system and more like a cosmos where images orbit until they suddenly align into new constellations.

At heart, I'm a collector who learned archival thinking, not an archivist who collects. The distinction matters: archivists preserve according to systems; collectors preserve according to wonder. My practice lives in that productive tension between the two.

You also incorporate AI and machine learning into your practice. What is your opinion of these technologies, and how do they differ from previous digital tools?

My engagement with AI came reluctantly. For years, I dismissed it as hype—just another layer atop existing digital tools. That changed dramatically when a filmmaker friend announced his transition to "AI filmmaker," using the technology for every production aspect. What I discovered left me both awestruck and deeply unsettled.

The difference between AI and previous digital tools is fundamental. The photorealistic portraits AI can generate—with flawless proportions and eerie verisimilitude—arrive fully formed in seconds. When I incorporated AI-generated portraits into my WE project, the results were indistinguishable from camera-captured negatives. Even I couldn't reliably tell them apart.

This technological leap sets off alarm bells for photography's future. We're approaching a crisis of historical truth. Until now, photographs—even manipulated ones—were rooted in camera-captured reality. Soon, we'll face synthetic "photographs" of events that never occurred: new portraits of long-dead icons, alternate angles of historic moments. These will mingle with genuine archival images in digital spaces where no technical difference exists between truth and fabrication.

The implications terrify me. As someone who works with vernacular photography, I think about the archives that discarded originals after digitization. How will we authenticate anything when every pixel can be conjured from nothing? This isn't just about photography's future—it's about our collective memory. We urgently need frameworks to protect visual historicity before the flood of synthetic imagery erodes our ability to believe what we see. 

AI isn't simply another tool—it's an existential challenge to photography's evidentiary status. My use of it comes with equal parts fascination and dread.

You mention Hannah Arendt in the project description of your series Those Who Hear the Ticking. Which theorists, writers, or schools of thought have most influenced your approach? How does theory influence your practice/method?

My relationship with theory is more osmotic than systematic—ideas seep in through reading and resurface intuitively while in the studio. I don’t make work about philosophy, but certain frameworks have undeniably shaped how I see photography’s role in culture.  

Marshall McLuhan’s presence loomed large during my New Media studies (his old haunt at the University of Toronto’s Coach House just steps from our classrooms). His insistence that "the medium is the message" clarified something essential for me: the photographic medium doesn’t passively capture reality—it actively influences what we capture, and by whom. This perspective threads through all my work, from interrogating vernacular processes to grappling with AI’s disruption of the medium’s truth-claims.  

Lately, I’ve been circling Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation and Derrida’s writings as I further develop WE—particularly their ideas about copies without originals in an age of synthetic imagery. And Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality remains a touchstone, its prescient warnings about fabricated authenticity feeling increasingly urgent.  

But my deepest obsession is photography’s own history. A mentor once advised me to "follow the footnotes" in books that moved me, sending me down a rabbit hole of out-of-print gems by forgotten theorists and historians. This archival impulse mirrors my artistic practice: I’m as likely to be informed by writing from the mid 20th century as by contemporary voices like Geoffrey Batchen or Clément Chéroux.  Theory doesn’t dictate my projects, but it gives me lenses to examine why certain images unsettle or compel me. When vernacular snapshots in Those Who Hear the Ticking echo Arendt’s ideas about banality and complicity, it’s not because I set out to illustrate her work—but because her questions about how ordinary people enact history had already rewired how I see ordinary photographs.

Do you believe there are specific political or social dimensions inherent in the production of digital images, or are their political implications determined solely by the ways in which they are used? These technologies are also the instruments of surveillance and oppression: Do you think there are ways to resist or work around these mechanisms while still engaging with them?

This question can be unpacked in so many ways, but here’s how I see it. The way we interact with photography has been completely transformed by digitization—a shift that happened alongside the rise of the internet and the tech giants that now control most of photography for everyday people. And it’s not just about moving from film to pixels. Over the past decade, the camera itself has been swallowed by the smartphone, and each of these changes has reshaped not just how we take photos, but who actually holds power over them.  

Most photos today don’t even belong to the people who take them. They live on corporate servers, in the so-called "cloud," where they’re scanned, tagged, and analyzed—faces, locations, even objects. These companies know who’s in your pictures, where you took them, and when. Just last week, Google Photos stitched together an automated video of every rainbow I’ve ever captured. It was eerily accurate. If it can spot rainbows, it can spot protest signs, political slogans, anything. And with governments now demanding social media checks for visa applicants, it’s clear where this is headed.  

Then there’s the fact that phone manufacturers have quietly built in remote camera-kill switches—supposedly for "sensitive" places like borders or military sites. But when news outlets and everyday witnesses rely on phone cameras, this means those in power can effectively block photography where it might expose them. It’s not hard to imagine a future where film cameras make a comeback, not for nostalgia, but as a way to slip past the digital panopticon.  
So yes, digital images are political by design. The real question isn’t whether they’re used for control—they already are—but whether we can outmaneuver that control. Maybe it’s film, maybe it’s encryption, maybe it’s just being smarter about where we store our photos.