Less Than Reality began with a fairly direct act: I used my own body to restage poses taken from photographs of hyperrealist sculpture. The project started as a response to a larger culture of repetition—remade films, new music engineered to sound old, and images of the future that still seem trapped inside earlier ideas of what the future should look like. I wanted to begin inside that condition rather than outside it. By restaging already mediated images through my own body, I was not trying to recover originality so much as test what could still happen through repetition.

Those early images now feel less like acts of self-preservation than the beginning of a loss. I photographed my performances and then altered them through digital editing and AI-based manipulation. The resulting figures still depended on my body, my pose, my camera, and my decisions, but they increasingly ceased to look like me. What emerged was not a stable self-portrait, but a gradual separation between bodily origin and visible identity. The project began to ask whether a self-portrait can survive once resemblance starts to disappear, or whether selfhood in the image is already being dispersed into process, substitution, and revision.

That question became more complicated when I began allowing a synthetic version of myself to take my place. This “synthetic artist” was generated from my appearance but was no longer simply a photograph of me. It could appear in performance images instead of my own body, stand in for me, and then be altered again. I remained responsible for the initial idea, the staging, the selection, the manipulation, and the final form, but parts of the work were increasingly delegated to a generated surrogate. The distinctions between artist, model, subject, and stand-in became unstable. The project no longer revolved only around whether an altered image of me was still a self-portrait, but around what happens when a substitute derived from me begins to perform that role in my place.

The museum emerged as an attempt to restore coherence to that instability. I began producing source records, witness photographs, identity files, condition reports, handling documents, reconstructions, surveillance views, and catalog entries. Eventually I built the Robert Milkwood Thomas Museum of Art as the institutional structure that could contain them. In one sense, the museum was an effort to regain a sense of self through classification, documentation, and administrative order—to stabilize figures whose identities had already begun to drift. But the institution did not resolve that drift. It reproduced it. As the archive expanded, manipulated photographs could become sculptural objects, altered figures could acquire biographies, and reconstructions could begin to compete with their supposed sources. The structure built to preserve identity became another mechanism for transforming it.

I am also aware that most viewers will not experience every part of the project. Some may encounter only a single image, an object record, a surveillance feed, or one page of the museum before moving on. I do not see that partial encounter as a failure of the work. The project exists in a digital environment where attention is fragmented and access is uneven, and that condition has become part of its structure. The complete archive is there for anyone who chooses to follow it, but no single viewer is required to reconstruct the whole system in order for the work to function.

I now see Less Than Reality as a project about loss, substitution, and attempted recovery. The early self-images do not preserve the self; they initiate its fragmentation. The museum is built to contain that fragmentation, yet it becomes unstable in turn, and eventually the system begins to privilege a synthetic version of the artist once enough information has been fed into it. The more data, decisions, images, and records I give the structure, the more capable it becomes of replacing me. The artist tried to preserve their identity and sense of self through images and institutions, but instead constructed a system that continued without the original body and produced a substitute to take their place.