DE: You’ve likened the series Elsewhere to a form of escapism. What are you, we, escaping? Is Elsewhere a suitable destination or something else?
EA: Elsewhere is the feeling of reaching for something just beyond the edges of your life. Something softer, quieter, and more cinematic than reality. It’s not about physically leaving but about finding relief from the sharp edges and heaviness of a world that often feels overwhelming. The world feels so heavy lately. For me, art becomes a way to sit with that longing, to explore it without needing to fully understand it.
Elsewhere lets the imagined carry as much weight as the lived. It exists in that fleeting space where beauty reminds us of what matters most. It’s not about being suitable or unsuitable, perhaps we can look at it as more of a mirage, which reflects our ache for something different. It’s where we go to make sense of life’s messiness.
At its core, Elsewhere is about longing. That endless reaching for what’s just out of reach. Maybe that’s the truest part of us. And maybe it’s not whether we arrived but why we needed to search in the first place. This longing is why I make art.
DE: I appreciate the analogy of Elsewhere as a kind of mirage. Are you familiar with Robert Hass’ idea of longing–‘because desire is full of endless distances’?
When I look at your images, specifically the palm trees on fire and the masses of people submerged in bodies of water, a dichotomy arises that blends a harsh, yet very real, environmental reality with fantastical respite where mankind evolves alongside the rapidly changing conditions of the world. It feels both dark and hopeful at once. Though, the implication in the word mirage leads me to think that there’s no safe respite.
Hass responded to the climate in his poetry as a form of activism. Visual art doesn’t necessarily have to bear the burden of social justice, but I would love for you to speak to the underlying narrative and your responsibility as an artist to respond to the climate crisis.
EA: Oh, I love this reference! Thank you for sharing it. No, I hadn’t come across this poem before, but it’s deeply moving. Desire is full of endless distances - so poignant. I contemplated this line in the shower this morning and it made me wonder, why does desire exist at all? Maybe it’s the gap, the space between where we are and what we want, that keeps us moving forward. Even as we get closer, the gap never disappears. That’s why I use the analogy of the mirage: a shimmer of something just beyond reach. You know it’s not real, but still, you keep looking. A mirage doesn’t provide what it promises, but its allure is rooted in what we wish to find. I find this simultaneously beautiful and unsettling.
The world, to me, is dark and strange, filled with mysteries and questions that never fully resolve. But something inside me pushes against that darkness, always searching for tiny flickers of light. I’ve always been drawn to the strangeness of things. Growing up, I dreamt my way through books and films. In a way, I find it all quite romantic. That’s why my art is ultimately about connection: with myself, with others, with the world, and with the underlying questions that tie us all together. The point where the unknown meets the familiar, and something new emerges, totally excites me.
I’ve been thinking about how global heating is reshaping the Gulf region where I live (the Arabian Peninsula). What happens when it becomes uninhabitable? Where do we go? And what happens to the concept of home? People have pointed out the burning palm trees in my work. They’ve said it feels like a sad reality check, especially after the wildfires in Los Angeles. My focus is on my landscape, but the climate crisis doesn’t belong to one place. It belongs to everyone. Those burning palms, the figures immersed in water, speak to environmental change, but they also gesture toward something more; maybe survival or adaptation. That tension between fragility and resilience keeps pulling me in. The stakes are high but there’s hope too. Life moves in cycles, but transformation is inevitable. What will it look like and will I even live to see it?
As an artist, I’m not here to offer solutions. I don’t feel like that’s my role. Instead, I ask questions and create space to sit with those questions. The climate crisis is so overwhelming. It can feel abstract one minute and a direct threat the next. I didn’t want to create work driven by fear, statistics, or an "end of humanity" narrative. Instead, I want to find another way to connect to what’s happening. These images were made for myself first, as a way to process. Art, for me, is a kind of refuge and a way to face the chaos. Transformation begins with yourself. If that transformation reaches someone else it’s a gift.
DE: Right. I get that there’s this huge burden on artists to be the translators and arbiters of some underlying knowledge source. While there’s truth to how art uncovers and reveals things about humanity, art as a statistical vehicle of truth puts a lot of pressure on the individual and is at risk of losing some of the inherent magic in the process. With that being said, I’m curious about what your relationship is with photography since that’s your primary medium, and how you regard “truth” as a core tenant encoded in photographic images. How do synthetic images, such as the ones you’ve made for Elsewhere, converse with your photographic practice?
EA: I think the only truth that can be found in an image is the truth you, as the photographer, want to tell your audience. It’s a subjective, selective truth. I learned this early on when I first started in my practice. Initially, I was interested in documentary photography and capturing real, raw, candid moments. But it didn’t take long to realize that what I was capturing was my own subjective experience. Over the years my focus has shifted, I’m less interested in documenting just what we see and more drawn to exploring what we feel and dream.
The images in Elsewhere, and all my other collaborations with AI, are an extension of that practice. My vision and interests haven’t changed. It’s just another way of exploring them. For me, working with AI isn’t about giving up control or letting the machine dictate the outcome. I pose the philosophical question for myself: what does it mean for an image to be "mine" when a machine is part of shaping it? I don’t see it as handing over creative agency, but a chance to engage with unpredictability. Something is fascinating about letting that randomness challenge and stretch the way I work. The result feels like a collaboration where control and chance work together. It pushes the boundaries of what an image can be while still holding onto the essence of my vision.
DE: That brings up this idea of authorship. Machine learning models are trained on massive amounts of images, culled from the internet’s far reaches and elsewhere. Do you consider this work to tap into a form of collective memory because of the contributions of so many other images and image-makers? Does the idea of co-authorship ungird the work at all? Do you train your own models?
EA: If we look at Western art history, it’s always been about borrowing and reimagining. Warhol pulled from mass media turning soup cans and celebrities into icons. Picasso drew inspiration from African art. The Renaissance masters reworked classical antiquity. None of it was original, but it was informed. In making it their own, they created something new. The same can be said for the work of contemporary artists Mickalene Thomas and Cindy Sherman. Just last night, during my late-night scrolling, I saw a video breaking down how Timbaland sampled a DEVO song to create something completely new, turning it into the sound for Oops (Oh My) by Tweet. It blew my mind. The best artists are true alchemists who pull from everywhere, sampling bits and pieces, and transforming them into something unique.
That’s what AI feels like to me–a massive archive of imagery to pull from and reshape. I’m in control, make the decisions, and push the work forward. AI doesn’t dictate the outcome, it opens up new possibilities and challenges me to see things differently. Sure, these models are built on countless contributions, and the idea of co-authorship is layered into the work but art has always been a conversation. AI is just another tool, another material to experiment with, expanding what’s possible. The works in Elsewhere are a blend of my own imagery and selected visual fragments. A process that’s multi-layered and collage-like.
I’ve tried training my own models, but it gave my poor, little MacBook a meltdown! It’s simply not built for that kind of work. To do it properly, I’ll need to upgrade to a desktop with a high-performance GPU. This will give me much more control, allowing me to train models using my own datasets and personal archives. I’m also eager to dive deeper into video, and training my models feels like the next natural step in that direction.
DE: Sampling in the music industry is a great reference and something that I’ve thought a lot about as well. The conversations around IP are interesting because at what point is a work or style appropriated? We, as a society, will have to get clear, at the pixel level, what we consider to be enough deviation from the source material to avoid plagiarism.
There are some initiatives to use datasets comprised of public domain images to train a model on, too, which is what is part of a “slower” AI movement. Ultimately, the people who make and use these tools will need to be very intentional in their application. I think training your model allows you to expand on an already established aesthetic that you’ve cultivated for yourself. Whereas a generic model is a statistical average of all images, including stock images and anything scraped from the internet. No one way is better than the other, but will depend on artistic intent. When you were generating images for this series, what were the perimeters you set for yourself? When did you consider an image “done”?
EA: With the concept in mind, I start by thinking about the mood and emotion I want to bring out. Light, shadow, and texture are everything. They shape the feeling, create depth, and give the work a kind of weight. I use my work as a base, so the color and mood I’m after are usually already there, but I’m always building on it. My approach to making pictures and AI-assisted work is very similar. That’s why they sit pretty comfortably together; they carry the same feeling.
I know an image is done when it hits me emotionally; when it feels like it’s saying something on its own without me having to explain. I trust my gut. It needs to reach that point where it starts to breathe on its own.
DE: Tell me more about Proteus.
EA: Proteus in Greek mythology is a sea god who could shape-shift to avoid telling the future. He only gave answers to those who could hold onto him long enough. That idea of slipping between forms, refusing to be pinned down, is what makes the word protean - versatile, mutable, always becoming.
The protea flower carries that same energy. It thrives in the kind of harsh, water-scarce places where most things give up. It doesn’t. It bends, burns, and still finds a way to bloom. Resilience. Survival. Adaptation. It’s not just a flower but a symbol. It makes sense that the protea is South Africa’s national flower. It holds the same persistence and refusal to disappear. I think about what it means to outlive the things that try to erase you and bloom anyway.
DE: I’ve been thinking a lot about the material properties of AI: the water required for training and computation, the land needed for the server farmers, and cloud services. The requirements are reshaping our planet and resources. Many people aren’t thinking about materiality when it comes to AI because it largely masquerades as a mode of production that appears on its surface as immaterial. In the case of generative AI, we think of digital images in large data sets that create a latent space composed of digitally native visual, textual, or auditory output. But I can imagine, from an artistic perspective, a physical component to the work you do. Can you speak to the bridge between the digital and material world in your work?
EA: AI isn’t weightless. It burns energy, consumes water, and takes up space. We might view it as abstract, but it’s raw, industrial, and physical. I've recently been thinking of AI as a sculptural act. This invisible sculptor shapes data like a chisel on stone. There’s this moment between input and output, where code reinterprets randomness, reshaping data into something new. That space, this in-between, is what I find sculptural. And you can never create the same thing twice.
In my practice, I’m interested in making the unseen visible. With Elsewhere, I take my AI collaborations and make them tangible, pulling the digital into the physical through print. Giving that weight back, but I want to turn Proteas into sculptures, shifting from digital to physical, 3D space. I’m drawn to both the permanence of classical sculpture and the ephemerality of nature. That tension adds another layer to the work because Elsewhere’s exploration of water scarcity isn’t just metaphorical. It also confronts the hidden environmental cost of AI, exposing the unseen toll of technology on the natural world.
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Danielle Ezzo is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, writer, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY.
