11 December 2025
At one point in the episode of the New Models podcast with K. Allado-McDowell (from 2024), one of the hosts (which appears to be the artist Daniel Keller) mentions how despite human vision spanning 180 degrees, it doesn't distort like a lens, but rather it flattens. This was in the context of a conversation revolving around Allado-McDowell's theorization of what they term “neural media” and how one of its defining characteristics is that its content is hallucinated. Anyone reading this should go listen to the episode for a deeper unpacking of what they mean by this and how they think about hallucination with respect to the user/consumer and neural media itself. It's a fascinating subject.
But the eye's flattening implying hallucination is less interesting to me than the act of its flattening itself, especially as it relates to painting—what I've been working on recently seems like it is dealing with flatness more directly than any of my previous work. A new painting, titled Flat window (Wandsworth) (working title) is an exercise in compression; of planes that can perhaps be traced to my body in space while walking on a sidewalk through Wandsworth, a car passing by me on the road, ambient light changing as the sun went down, seeing a reflection of said car passing in the window of a flat I was walking by, and seeing beyond that reflection into a fragment of the interior of the flat. Painting as a node.