A daily series on Rodeo.club.

In PHONE DROP TEST (Touching Grass 001-xxx), each shattered screen is a fractured portal to the world we've been scrolling past. Starting with my own archive of broken screen photographs as seeds (reinterpreted with AI) has naturally expanded as collectors began sharing their personal artifacts of digital destruction, creating a collective meditation on our mediated reality.

My process merges traditional photography with AI interpretation, revealing both how machines see through these broken barriers and how our digital interfaces mediate and limit our experience of reality. Starting with an archive of my own broken safety glass photographs as seeds, I use AI to explore how machines 'see' through these fractured lenses, much like how our phones increasingly interpret and process our visual world. The resulting images are neither purely photographic nor purely artificial, but exist in the same hybrid space where most contemporary image-making now lives. This process echoes how modern smartphones capture images through a complex interaction of optical lenses and computational photography, acknowledging and exposing that layered relationship between human vision, mechanical capture, and digital interpretation.

The series deliberately employs Rodeo's social platform as both medium and message, where each broken screen, captured as a social media post, creates a recursive commentary. As artists and collectors began privately sharing photographs of their own shattered devices, the project evolved into a participatory artwork. Released during Rodeo's explosive growth and its FOMO-driven collecting frenzy, these daily drops gain additional resonance in the platform's endless scroll. The very act of collecting these moments of digital destruction becomes part of the performance. In invoking the digital vernacular of 'touching grass,' the series transforms this internet imperative into a visual meditation on the boundaries between digital immersion and physical reality.