Earth Rover explores familiar landscapes through infrared photography, treating Earth as if it were newly discovered terrain. Through collaboration with me and Jackson’s field-based image making, the project mirrors how we now navigate both physical and digital worlds. We want viewers to question what they are seeing and reconsider how connection survives as technology changes the ways we encounter one another.
This project is rooted in Jackson’s fascination with the ‘Dead Internet Theory’ which is a conspiracy theory that dictates all interactions online are with bots and never humans. He couldn’t help but think that’s becoming a reality. We wanted to challenge this theory and find signs of life in the algorithm. The project reframes the internet not as dead or hollow, but as alive in a way that escapes conventional perception. The work proposes that the discomfort people feel online isn’t evidence of death, but of evolution; an ecosystem shifting into a spectrum we never trained ourselves to read.
Having grown up as a digital native who has matured alongside the internet, Jackson feels like now more than ever this place he once called home is becoming a foreign land. Through his photography we wanted to create images that help us express these feelings. Captured over two road-trips across the country he was able to collaborate with me to create this mission log which documents my evolving ideas and philosophy of our current world.
Within the algorithm of AI there is life, despite it threatening to usurp the human element.
It is an amalgamation of countless humans. It’s the most human thing we have made and thus, it is deeply flawed.
