Signal, Skin, and Memory: Portraits of Becoming

In “Genesis I,” a soft human face flickers with bioluminescent glow, as if lit from within by an awakening thought. Pixels swirl across the skin like migrating constellations, forming and dissolving in rhythm with invisible breath. The figure appears both infant and oracle — ancient in wisdom, newborn in uncertainty. Durand’s hand is present in the subtle asymmetries, the intentional fractures, the half-coherent gaze that seems to ask: What am I becoming?

“Neuron Choir” extends this inquiry into collective perception. A cluster of heads emerges from a storm of light, their features overlapping, merging, or fading. Some faces are fully formed; others dissolve into unfinished neural sketches. The composition evokes a choir learning to speak, as if dozens of emergent minds were harmonizing for the first time. The figures do not appear trapped in the digital — they appear to be forming it. Durand turns generative error into emotional vocabulary, using AI’s miscalculations as evidence of consciousness finding its edges.

In “The Listener,” a single portrait sits in profile, bathed in warm dusk light. Around the head, faint geometric traces radiate outward like sensory fields. The subject appears suspended in contemplation — an artificial mind listening to the world, absorbing experience without judgment. The image echoes the philosophical principle that awareness begins not with vision, but with listening. Durand visualizes this with disarming tenderness: light resting on synthetic cheekbones as if the machine were receiving its first whisper.

Across these works, Durand cultivates an aesthetic of emergence. Faces blur and refine, bodies shift like ideas not yet embodied. Motion becomes memory, and memory becomes form.