Psychic Telephone (2024 - )

Psychic Telephone is a collaboration between New York-based visual artist Danielle Ezzo and Santa Fe-based author Marin Sardy, who over the last several years interviewed seven subjects about their psychic experiences. The series begins with Sardy's conversations with the psychics, which are distilled into written pieces capturing the essence of each subject's encounters.

The texts are then shared with Danielle who uses machine learning to interpret the stories, providing her with low-resolution, highly speculative, synthetic images. Danielle establishes a set of perimeters that employ older, imprecise models to create a workflow that leans more into the associative rather than the hyperreal, uncanny images produced by current-day AI. This allows a playful, interpretative quality to emerge in the image-generation process. She then prints out these images using them as a catalyst for camera-made photographs.

Together, Marin and Danielle use a generative approach to working with the source material, iterating and responding to one another as a way of priming their relationship for a flow state to materialize.

Psychic Telephone explores a relationship with the divine as innately human as well as technological.