Fled is the night; do i wake, or sleep?
10/2024
10/2024
Iris and I met in college, and she was actually the first friend I made in the department. We’ve known each other for years, so I’ve been able to watch her work grow and evolve throughout that time. I’ve always admired what she does, and I’m really happy to have her here with us. So, to start, could you tell us a little about your work?
Currently, I am engaged in a long term project, not necessarily bound to a particularly named body of work, and more of a central vehicle of my practice--I think of it as an ongoing contemplative process, insight and novel forms always coming about with continued work.
These works can be generally described as stacked mosaics, derived of many overlapping digital photographs arranged in all sorts of geometries, with which I reproduce the experience of vision and explore its processes, literally or metaphorically.
The work carries much discovered narrative and poetic weight, cataloguing and commenting on the process of self-realization amidst all of being, and the role of the momentary experience of perception and experience and attention as the very site of weaving oneself into being.
How did this particular visual language, the overlapping images, come about?
With regards to the stacked mosaics, there was a point about three years ago in which a metaphysical balloon popped in my life, and suddenly I found myself undergoing a whole lot of change very quickly.
Things that were once still, but ultimately untethered and had never seen their durability tested, began a process of rapid movement, change, and recontextualization--I was not ready and could not be, and in this process I have found myself in my journey through the space between selves. I spent a lot of time contending with nonbeing as a practical condition within this period of my life, which really cleanly maps to the first image.
The signature of this mosaic material arrived before the words; the first image in this lineage, "i'm dragging a dead deer up a hill", coalesced from images I took in my hometown while I sat on the couch next to my roommate at the time, who was working on her music contemporaneously.
Above the streetlights, below the stars
10/2024
10/2024
I'm not convinced by any single explanation as conclusive alone. Ultimately I feel this work has taken on the form of an extended, embodied meditation on the experience of piecing together perspective and personhood across space and time, and has plenty of space to carry all sorts of concepts, feelings, and dynamics. This work was latent in my thinking and seeing for a long time, was made possible by my work with stitched/perfect panoramas, and made inevitable as life had me find out what was to be done once I had exhausted flimsy certainties.
And so I carry on piecing things together.
You talked about wanting to place the work within different frames of reference and ways of understanding. How do you like to present the photographs once they’re finished?
I share my work on social media, and with dear friends and collaborators across fields. I'm very keen on plugging my work into all sorts of frames of reference and modes of understanding, just as the work ultimately winds up holding so many such modes in its inspiration and execution.
I envision in time large format display. I do not default to a print, necessarily -- I am quite partial to the rear-illuminated transparency, as an extension of the philosophy of vision I enact in my practice and embed in the work, and extend beyond sight entirely into the general realm of making meaning. Scale is very important -- these works comment on the nature of detail and scale--very often, what appears to be a coherent scene at a reasonable distance reveals its seams up close; what appears to be softness at a typical distance reveals itself to be a hyperabundance of sharply delineated detail up close.
I am also very interested in exploring the perceptual space within large language models that are capable of working with images natively. It is immensely interesting and useful to me to approach and discuss my work with models, with a mind for the inherent dramaturgy and the ethics of storytelling as I do. Embedded within the models are a universe of characters that write themselves in dialogue--I talk about all models, but especially more unique and bespoke open source models. I will explore my images through conversations with models in direct dialogues informed by various schools of psychoanalysis, poetry, and math/neuroscience/machine learning readings, as an exercise in storytelling and likewise an odyssey into the associative structures of these novel entities. Likewise, I explore what my work looks like within the activation patterns of the models, using what are called sparse autoencoders (SAEs), examining what registers. I am fascinated by the idea of a platonic viewer, and also by the dramaturgy of storytelling to said viewer and learning from my own process of expression what is meaningful.
It went like this:
In the late fifteenth century, an acorn sprouted in an old growth hardwood forest and grew into a healthy young oak in the coming years
By luck, it continued to grow stronger and taller over decades, and then a century, and then another, and another, and another, and yet another more to reach the present, all the while standing staid as nearly all life around it was consumed and irreparably redirected by the colonial cataclysm
Over the course of a life now better measured in fractions of a millennium, perhaps no period may be more perplexing from its sagely vantage than the dizzying exponentials unfurled in the industrial era
It was slow at first--wobbles in the mycorrhizal network--and then it was as if a dam burst--contemporaries shrieking and then going silent together in bunches, then in acreages--and then it happened all at once:
In the century approaching its half millennium of living, the air on its leaves rapidly grew thicker with carbon, the groundwater on its roots came to taste more and more of strange chemicals with time, the pollinator cycles wobbled and the once buzzing rhizomatic network went quiet, the sky was crisscrossed with cobwebs, while machine sounds clogged the acoustic airwaves
But none struck the tree so tragic as the night never getting dark anymore like it did when it was young, the night in which it spoke to its friends through the roots, shared thoughts on the day's meditations and knew it was not alone--it is the last its kind now, as far as it can tell, and at five hundred, it isn't getting anything but late
You and i may be younger than this tree, but we too know what it is like to live in a world knocked on its side by exponential curves going vertical.
Deep time wears on, and within it a countervailing heuristic of entropy, one with no grace, holds us hostage by disempowering dependence
It will progress from here, faster and faster and faster… until it can no longer
We must prepare ourselves for the grief
06/2026
In the late fifteenth century, an acorn sprouted in an old growth hardwood forest and grew into a healthy young oak in the coming years
By luck, it continued to grow stronger and taller over decades, and then a century, and then another, and another, and another, and yet another more to reach the present, all the while standing staid as nearly all life around it was consumed and irreparably redirected by the colonial cataclysm
Over the course of a life now better measured in fractions of a millennium, perhaps no period may be more perplexing from its sagely vantage than the dizzying exponentials unfurled in the industrial era
It was slow at first--wobbles in the mycorrhizal network--and then it was as if a dam burst--contemporaries shrieking and then going silent together in bunches, then in acreages--and then it happened all at once:
In the century approaching its half millennium of living, the air on its leaves rapidly grew thicker with carbon, the groundwater on its roots came to taste more and more of strange chemicals with time, the pollinator cycles wobbled and the once buzzing rhizomatic network went quiet, the sky was crisscrossed with cobwebs, while machine sounds clogged the acoustic airwaves
But none struck the tree so tragic as the night never getting dark anymore like it did when it was young, the night in which it spoke to its friends through the roots, shared thoughts on the day's meditations and knew it was not alone--it is the last its kind now, as far as it can tell, and at five hundred, it isn't getting anything but late
You and i may be younger than this tree, but we too know what it is like to live in a world knocked on its side by exponential curves going vertical.
Deep time wears on, and within it a countervailing heuristic of entropy, one with no grace, holds us hostage by disempowering dependence
It will progress from here, faster and faster and faster… until it can no longer
We must prepare ourselves for the grief
06/2026
The practice is one of attending to and conveying meaning. Person or model, it is an exercise I revel in and is essential to unfurling my understanding further from the images. What you give is what you get, and it does not at all necessitate forfeiture of cognitive autonomy; as with all things, one chooses only their own adventure, sees only the possibilities they are prepared to see. I enjoy the storytelling and self teaching possible through the references a model can make available. It is often the case that I produce an essay-length text of a thousand or even thousands of words accompanying a single image as the cumulative context and set of associations and ideas grows in my retelling. And then I have a long record of my own thoughts over time brought from the mode of expressing myself in my own terms, when working ideas out or presenting something as complete, and also a huge amount of surface area on my interests and concerns from which I can then receive excellent and voluminous recommendations of material made by people that would perhaps be useful to explore in context of what I am thinking about. Some of the baseline machine learning discoveries that pushed large language models over the line were made due to the fruits of the attention capture economy in terms of money and compute infrastructure, and also the techniques of understanding media in terms of semantic association so as to infer recommendations by the secondary logic of maximizing attention. The linguistic aspects of the LLM, however, derived from the transformer architecture and from attention mechanisms that completed the first loop, came from translation and natural language processing; these are fundamentally technologies that can work with meaning as their substrate material, and what you get is what you offer and what you seek as an individual. I must note that my perspectives about my individual usages of LLMs are distinct from my diagnosis and critique of their structural role as technologies of enclosure at the hands of this power structure, which seeks enclosure and extraction on its own–this has to be said. I am also speaking of the utility of the LLM independent of the US closed source labs, or even expensive inference entirely. I do not endorse the meaning of the technology proposed by the power structure, and am insistent that the future is authored actively, not inevitable; an abundance of possible better worlds exist at our collective fingertips.
Mostly, though, the photographs are artifacts of the broad process of my finding my way, metaphysically, and are fashioned as universal references for my cosmology and the things I have learned. They are existential waypoints, notes on the journey, snapshots passing through this plane as a soul here for seemingly the first time.
Badwater Basin, 2 am
08/2021
08/2021
Going back to where it all started, how did you first become interested in photography?
I became familiar with the family point and shoot digital cameras as a child, and found the experience and idea of photographing quite fun then. The photograph became a far more personal thing when I was 13, and got my first smartphone--an iPhone 5S. I had a waterproof case, and also would use third party apps to take long exposures with it. Star trails implied an astonishing principle: the camera makes accessible ways of seeing that are impossible for my eyes, and I can use both to extend what I know about the world around me. It snowballed from there. The principal focus for the first few years was astrophotography, which taught me so much about light and how the digital camera can receive it. From there, the world opened up as a site of photographing over years to come. It became a way of making a sort of existential map.
I love how you think of photography as a form of attention. How does that idea come into play throughout your creative process?
First and foremost, it is a contemplative practice, in the spirit of a walking meditation. I draw the contents of my awareness of a place into the same space as what I see within it. From this body of experience, I then select the substrates for my work--the scenes that call to me by feeling, by necessity of attention. As I apply attention to a place, to a process, to the feelings of each resonating within, so too do I apply attention in using the camera.
My primary camera is a digital camera, a Sony A7iii. I use it fully manually, and use manual primes on it as well. My principal lens is a Rokkor 50mm f/1.4 analog prime, and it has been on my camera almost without exception for the past three years.
I primarily work in mosaics now, each finished image derived from a set of overlapping frames that cover a wider field of view. I arrange the overlapping leaves manually in Photoshop and then stack the mosaic, collecting all layered pixels and producing an output by a chosen statistical relation, such as the median pixel value or the maximum pixel value for a given location in the image.
At heaven’s door, an answer
10/2024
10/2024
A wide variety of appearances are made possible by different ways of stacking, from the standard modes in Photoshop to the arbitrary parameters that can be applied using lightweight custom programs. Some accentuate differences that occurred over time in the set of frames, others draw the mosaic toward only that which stays the same over the time of the set.
I favor median stacking, which can be thought of as an even compromise that emphasizes what is agreed upon about the scene by all overlapping frames, but without eliminating the disagreements--just displaying them in proportion.
There are two modes to these pieces: rectilinear mosaics, which chart a grid of exposures spanning a field of view that overlap by about 30%, and polar mosaics, which are made by rotating the image around a central focal point between each frame over the course of dozens to hundreds of frames. The rectilinear mosaics can be understood as looking broadly and getting the lay of the land, and the polar mosaics as giving deep attention to a singular detail or presence within a scene.
This technique first emerged practically, in response to a unique problem--piecing together mosaics with large portions of the scene out of focus that are also made in low light. It merges expertise from my astrophotography practice with my experience making mosaic images that hold a larger scene, but departs from the necessity that they conceal their constructed nature through 'perfect' automated alignment and stitching. Eyesight is made up of many glances!
Like contemplative practice, its essence is a solo pilgrimage; others may join along for the ride, but some of the most consequential material is available only to one who is in solitude with all of existence. I hike in to waterfalls at night, and float in the ice cold water in the dark. I have driven tens of thousands of miles by myself over time making pilgrimage to locations that draw me.
It is a matter of paying attention, and picking up the phone when it rings. I make myself available to the world around me by way of pilgrimage, and it makes itself available to me to discover.
Letting go is going free
03/2026
03/2026
If there is anything you would like to discuss with us, please feel free to write it here.
My work is largely in conversation with things outside of photography. Most of my conceptual inspirations have come from scientific and philosophical papers and essays I read in my teens, when I was first starting to take my photographic work more seriously. I was reading a lot of neuroscience, biological and computational, at the time, crossed over with psychopharmacology and neurophenomenology; this reading was informed by my experience of repeated silly accident head injuries in this period of time (think, cliff diving with friends at the lake and rolling in the air and hitting the water head and neck first, etc.), and finding the landscape of my senses and perception and unnameable mental flows altered immediately, and then figuring out how to find my way back, or establish new stabilities in this landscape of rapid change. I had no way to describe this process out loud, not in its felt sense; upon reflection, the images are a document of this process, without the compressed mediation of words.
I draw most of my inspiration outside of visual art entirely; I am moved by experience, observation, tangible revelations of the ordering of the universe by physical law in process. I'm less indexed to what has been made before artistically, and it is the case that I was barely aware of past work that rhymes with mine while originating my processes and perspectives. It is important to me to keep a sort of monastic seclusion with my artistic process and concerns; I do not get my sunlight from inside the house.
I actually am very keen to triage how much photography and visual art I look at, especially through the mode of the screen. Too much psychology of mimicry and insecure comparison baked into the habit of that interface--books in hand are an entirely different thing, though. Mimicry that is overdetermined by lack of diverse input and shaped by the neurosis-manipulating heuristics of social media display is, I think, the principal mechanism of the mode collapse of art today that is producing slop and infinitely derivative self similarity across networks of artists.
On the other side of the end of everything, there is something stranger than nothing. Pure potentiality; reach this place, and it all starts over again.
07/2026
07/2026
These times are eschatological, in the sense of profound change rather than comic book destructive apocalypticism, with regards to the life of the spirit and the work of enspiriting one's person through action and choice; there is a profound and precisely authored enclosure of human identity, human life, and thinking and seeing that seeks to foreclose choice. One person at the table takes out their phone for a second, and suddenly everyone who has gathered for dinner is on their phone--multiply this phenomenon of mimicry offering permission for installed compulsion across an endless variety of scenarios, and the idea I am describing for how human society can be captured reflexive back to the broader effort of technocapital to freeze the social order and lock in material power long term. The stakes genuinely are this grand; shift a society into an enclosed structure with an engineered social and political physics, and the future becomes procedurally generated.
I am radically suspicious of the intentions woven into the now-compulsory digital layer cast over our society by the self-styled priests of technocapital, and have researched and thought very intently on the mechanisms and dynamics of digital technology as a set of techniques for social control, first and foremost. People talk about 'the algorithm' (there are many but like crabs evolving over and over, they all converge on manipulating the viewer to capture their attention and prevent escape velocity) knowing them better than themselves--this is only because it has sufficient surface area on all of us, in an environment it is native to and we are not, to telegraph this. It has predictive power because we have been pulled into circumstances, ways of being and relating, that allow these predictions to be made; if you present no surface area of yourself to an attention capture algorithm, it cannot capture your attention.
I look at the potential of the tech tree, the research possibilities and ideas for usefulness and expansion of human agency and well being that could have been developed but were not because they did not offer the immediate revenue incentives of species-scale psychological manipulation vis a vis cynical ad-based social media, and I see an opportunity for a renegotiation to occur if people of sufficient defense of the living and literacy with the tech and mechanisms at play can propose a vocabulary for all this is that is something besides the exact marketing language of those profiting off of digital misery. In part my work has arrived at a gesture towards creating a potent, lucid, humanistic vocabulary and symbology for the concepts at play that is accessible and does not concede the sacredness of human choice, curiosity, and interest. I am keenly mindful of the violation taking place when our capacity for these things is captured through our habits relating to digital technology and used against us for profit and social control.
I am interested too in a sort of thinking I describe as finding light leaks in the Cartesian theater--which is to say, I am intent on discarding Cartesian dualist dissociation for the infinitely rich fleshy complexity of our sensory and mental life as inseparable from the life of all of our body. I believe wisdom moves from within and from beneath, and that the digital hypnosis separating us from knowing all that which we hold within is thin and flimsy once contact with The Real Thing is re-established.
The cathedral is built mostly of gravity
09/2026
09/2026
Are there any artists, who have left a significant impact on your life and work?
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Annie Dillard. Nagarjuna. Mary Oliver. St. Paul the Apostle. Frank Ocean. Loren McIntyre (his story, not his images as they are hard to find.) Abby Robinson. Accra Shepp. Karl Friston. Robin Carhart-Harris. Kant. Spinoza! Hume. Deleuze and Guattari. Isaac Wright. Paul Root. Barry Jenkins' Moonlight (2016). My adventurous friend F who taught me courage is occasioned by fear, and that the only way forward is through despite a pounding heart. The Eddington Experiment, where the validation of Einstein's relativity, all that math and thought, came down simply to looking close at the universe via the photographs made of the starlight displaced by the sun's gravity as seen during the 1919 total solar eclipse. Frank Hurley's photographs from Endurance. Michael Mann. My grandmother Harriet Yaun. People on Reddit whose names I will never know, whose photographs I saw when I was a teenager just locking in. The fish in the stream out back growing up, and the big tall hemlock tree by it too. And the snapping turtle that lays her eggs up the hill in the neighbors' yard every spring. The brook trout hovering in sunlight in the sheltered pools of hemlock shaded streams. The sun and the moon, and the infinity revealed in the Earth's shadow. The night, my oh my, the night! In the night, I have found my way by another light. I have learned so much looking at the dark and seeing that I cannot see black because of the glow on my retina that shows up when I close my eyes.
What place does analog or alternative photography occupy in your life? Is it part of your work or more of a hobby?
Analog has taught me a lot, and is something I enjoy tremendously in an entirely different way to the digital-heavy center of my practice. They complement each other, each sharpens the other's choreography, but it is expensive and also there are ways of camera-assisted seeing and working with images that are legitimately -- not just figuratively -- impossible on analog media.
The observer winks back from within the observation
09/2025
09/2025
Let’s get a little more technical. What camera and equipment do you usually work with, and how did you find them?
I use a Sony A7iii that I bought in March of 2021, right after I arrived in New York City for the time I lived there. It is my principal camera, and has been an absolutely remarkable instrument with which to learn more and more about the mechanics of making photographs far beyond the edge of the light most people I know would consider making images in. I mount vintage primes onto it, the Minolta-Rokkor primes I got with my first film camera when I bought it at a thrift store as a teenager.
I have not made analog work in over three years, but when I was making analog images, I used a Mamiya 645E on indefinite loan from a dear artist friend who had moved elsewhere besides photography. I have used various loaned medium format and large format systems, but only the Mamiya was something I had with me as if my own.
Have you come across any particular film that surprised you? Do you have a favorite film, and if so, what makes it special to you?
Ektachrome 100. I have an abiding reverie and affection for this emulsion. Skin tones in sunlight on ektachrome are without peer, for portraiture. The grain is invisible, a different kind truly, and the reciprocity dynamics are different, allowing night work to exquisite result. Its images feel True.
How do you engage with the film development or enlargement process? If you work in another type of printing, please share details about it.
I have spent much time in B&W and RA-4 darkrooms before, and it taught me so much about the character of light, tone, color, and also the conceptual dynamics of the image--thinking about the lineage of the visual information from scene to negative to print, and what it describes about the choreography of seeing without mediation.
I have often made analog prints, B&W or RA-4, and then scanned them to use for mosaic processes. It is not uncommon that I use an entire medium format roll on one mosaic, and then scan either the film or prints or both to create a stacked mosaic afterwards, if I am doing so analog.
I was but a vapor trail then
09/2021
09/2021
You’re actually the first guest I’ve invited specifically because of your digital work, which I personally find really innovative. I know you also work with film, so I’m curious—how do you see the differences between working digitally and with analog? And when do you find yourself choosing one over the other?
I now exclusively photograph in digital format. I love analog processes, but I am skeptical of any and all who give any credence to some idea of film as superior. I am skeptical of the fetish object that the large format negative has become in the halls where traditional institutional photography is authored, the view camera, the slow and expensive process implying meaning simply from largess. It strikes me as not about the image at all, and instead about an ethic and a performance. Nonsense. We must work with what we have, and I’m not convinced it is necessary to spend hundreds of dollars to make a few dozen images. Meaning cannot be purchased by the sheet. Let's get back to the work of looking!
My glances and attention are free and infinitely abundant. I like my digital camera because I can bring it where my eyes and body go without hiccups. I can depict processes of motion and subtle illuminations that would be literally impossible and very, very expensive and inaccessible to attempt with analog processes. I am a bit polemic about this because I think a lot of people wind up forfeiting authorship for genre mimicry, and analog processes seem to send this tendency into absolute overdrive for so many.
I think a lot of people like film because it decides on the character of the picture--light and color--for them, and frees them from overthinking so that they may focus on the seeing, and I totally understand this. Possibility without telos is terrifying; "what the hell am I supposed to do with 14 bit color RAW files?", I'm sure many have asked in one way or another. There's a really beautiful dialog of imagination and pragmatic execution that has proliferated in the interplay between my periods of analog focus and my digital focus. I am not done, it is just expensive and I am in the throes of essential work that I can only do digitally at the moment.
Ultimately I've learned how to decide from the conversation between these two aspects of my practice.
Thank you so much for joining us and for sharing your work with us. To see more of Iris’s work, follow her on Instagram @iris.yaun.
It's just going to get weirder and weirder, and weirder, and finally it's going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is. May we learn to befriend the strangeness
08/2026
08/2026