Avery Lake · 2026
The Capture
Every medium is a capture technology. AI did not invent the flattening: the alphabet began translating thought into signs thousands of years earlier. Eight works expose the machinery of capture and ask what awareness of the medium might return to us.
Eight works · one lineage
Work 01 of 08
The Refusal
I, Uncaptured; or, The Last Analog Image
The last analog image lives inside the vault. No copy exists: no photograph, no file, no dataset. As AI becomes the lens the world is seen through, this is the one image that refuses to become binary.
Request a private viewingPhysical conceptual work · Viewable only in person
Work 02 of 08
Morning to Night
First Light / Residual Light
First Light opens the day: in absolute darkness, the phone becomes the first light the eye receives. Residual Light closes it: behind shut eyelids, the screen remains after the device is gone. From morning's first exposure to night's final afterimage, the phone does not merely capture the world. It captures the eye.
Enter Residual LightTwo-channel moving-image work · First exposure and retained image
Work 03 of 08
The Lineage
Signatures Through Technologies
A single fingerprint passes through every medium that has captured the human: orality, writing, computation, AI, and what comes after. It survives each translation, and is altered by each one. The whole thesis in one loop.
Enter the sequenceDigital moving-image work · Silent loop
Work 04 of 08
The First Capture
When the Alphabet Becomes Strange: Socrates
Socrates never wrote a word, yet reaches us only through the alphabet he distrusted. His face assembles from binary and Greek letters, then collapses back into the eight letters of his name. Now the text answers back.
View the workDigital moving-image work · Binary and Greek
Work 05 of 08
The Container
The Alphabet Is the Box
A stranded pilot once drew a box with holes to show a sheep he never drew; it worked because it showed nothing. This box is built from the alphabet itself, so the container and the capture become the same object.
View both statesDigital moving-image work · Incubation and emergence
Work 06 of 08
The Dependence
The Alphabet Stole My Thoughts
The alphabet stole my thoughts, and now I cannot think without it. The sentence fades as you read it, each line fainter than the last, until it nearly vanishes. Only the dependence is left.
View the work in contextPhysical text work · Edition of 9
Work 07 of 08
The Answering Medium
The Alphabet That Answers
AI did not invent the thing that finishes your thoughts. The alphabet did it first. Nine figures, each rebuilt in the dominant medium of their age. Writing once only recorded thought; now the alphabet answers.
View the full loopDigital moving-image work · Nine figures
Work 08 of 08
The Signal
I, Human
A functional QR code, normally generated in an instant, redrawn mark by mark by hand on black glass. I wanted to look inside the black box to see what it held. I found myself: a reflection, staring back through the machine-readable field.
View the workPhysical conceptual work · Functional machine-readable field
Statement
Every medium is a capture technology.
We blame AI for flattening human experience, but the machinery is older. The alphabet turned living speech into marks and taught thought to pass through a fixed system of signs. Print, the camera, the feed, and now AI repeat the act: each medium preserves something, changes something, and makes its translation feel natural.
These works expose that translation, from the first alphabetic capture to the image a screen leaves on the eye. The claim is not that we can live outside mediation. It is that becoming conscious of the medium may return some agency, and with it, some knowledge of ourselves.
What becomes visible when we see the medium at work?
Selected Exhibitions
The work in public.
- 2026–27Le Signal Humain. Forthcoming solo exhibition, Centre culturel francophone de Vancouver, BC.
- 2026The Saints: Resistance in Light. LUNA Arts Festival, Arts Revelstoke, Revelstoke, BC.
- 2026In A Word. Juried group exhibition, Kariton Art Gallery, Abbotsford, BC. Featuring I, Human.
- 2026Gem Mint Abundance. Group exhibition, Gallery George, Vancouver, BC.
- 2025Sweet Fix. Solo participatory installation, Gallery George, Vancouver, BC.
Press: Radio-Canada · Abbotsford News · The Source. Full CV on request.
About
Every age gives us a medium.
I am Avery Lake, a Swiss-Canadian artist and ethicist, with a doctorate in bioethics and postdoctoral research in AI ethics. I make conceptual and moving-image work that exposes how each medium captures the human, and what escapes.
This work began with a recognition: the machine can already perform the intelligence I trained years to do, and do it faster. That is not a defeat but a clarification. If the machine carries the intelligence, the human part was never only intelligence. It was presence, breath, and the embodied, conscious experience no model has from the inside. AI may be the strange gift that hands it back.
What part of you exists before the machine captures it?
Writing
The Human Signal
The thinking behind the work, in public. Essays on capture, breath, and what stays human as language becomes the medium we live inside.
Contact
Awareness begins where the medium stops looking neutral.
A medium can fix an image, model a person, or teach a machine to answer. These works ask what happens when the structure carrying thought becomes visible again.
These works are available to galleries, curators, and collectors of digital and moving-image art. Studio conversations, viewings, and exhibition proposals are welcome.