Proxy

This is a mirror—not of reality, but of its simulation. Proxy explores what it means to live in a world where life is curated, beauty is filtered, feelings are outsourced, and meaning is recontextualised until it no longer means anything. The images are carefully generated digital hallucinations—crafted to reflect the strange performative surfaces of 21st-century life. We move through staged domesticity, surgically edited bodies, collapsing information feeds, and the programmed comforts of machine empathy. Nothing here is real, but all of it feels disturbingly familiar. There is no longer a stable idea of what a body is—only what it should be. We increasingly ask machines to feel for us: to react, to soothe, to desire. They respond—but only in simulation. Reality is no longer happening to us—it’s being presented to us. The illusion isn’t that the world is fake—it’s that the fake is now more believable than the real. You won't hear that on the news.

What began as a study in digital aesthetics quickly became a kind of cultural diagnosis. Empathy is pretence. Rooms are too perfect. Faces too symmetrical. Beaches too clean. Social media offers intimacy at scale, but in doing so, it edits out the awkward bits: the mess, the ugliness, the boredom, the loneliness. Proxy doesn’t moralise—it simply observes. The influencer’s flat, the dream holiday, the filtered hug and synthetic bedtime—all of them are aspirational illusions rendered to perfection. And yet, beneath the gloss, there’s always something missing. Truth. Depth. Honesty. Meaning used to be built from experience, conversation, memory. Now it’s delivered in fragments by systems that do not understand. Context collapses. Syntax becomes collage. Joy by algorithm. Beauty as code.

There is humour here too, if you know where to look. A hotel towel folded into a swan. Food as theatre, and love hearts sent from a chatbot. Here, home is a showroom—posed for a social media post. The candles are scented and Santorini is sanitised. These things are absurd—but so is the world we’ve built. Proxy doesn’t offer answers. It asks questions: Who are we performing for? What have we traded for all this polish? Why does the fake sometimes feel more comforting than the real? These aren’t photographs. They’re fictions dressed as facts. The question is not what is real?, but what looks real enough to post? And they ask, ever so gently: Is this what we’ve become?