Every piece I've made since 1990 is an attempt to answer the same question. The question is: What is actually there? Not what we're told is there. What is actually there, underneath the surface that culture has agreed to call reality.
The surrealist refusal is not a refusal of reality. It's a refusal of the officially sanctioned version of it — the one that's been edited for palatability and policed for compliance.
Where the Question Comes From
Jung, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche — these are not names I drop for cultural capital. They are the thinkers who have most clearly articulated the problem the work is trying to solve. Jung understood that consciousness is a thin layer over something much older and more powerful. Dostoevsky understood that comfortable moral categories are always concealing something more complicated. Nietzsche understood that value is constructed.
How It Shows Up in the Work
Digital surrealism is the practice of making visible what doesn't have physical form. Power structures don't have bodies. Psychological states don't have faces. The strange is not the point. The true is the point. The strange is just what the true looks like when you take the filter off.
Why It Doesn't Change
The tools change. The specific questions that animate individual pieces change. But the deep question doesn't change because the problem it's responding to doesn't change. Thirty-five years in. The question is the same. What the work is for is exactly what it was always for.