Kevin Abosch: For most of my life, I didn’t really understand the actual definition of passion. When people would ask me if I was passionate about my work, I would reflexively respond, “No,” and that “I really like what I do, and it’s more of an internal obligation than anything else.
Today, however, after actually looking up the definition in a dictionary a couple of years ago, I realize that I am in fact passionate about my work and many other things. I’m passionate about my relationships with family and friends, the human condition, and defending human rights. The part of the definition that sold me was the bit about “barely controllable emotion.” I can definitely relate to this. I would say I’m passionate.

As a child, I was passionate about acquiring knowledge, particularly the type that would give me a sense of feeling connected to the world outside of myself. By the time I was 10, I had amassed a rather impressive collection of National Geographicmagazines—perhaps a thousand of them, and I assure you, I read every single one of them from cover to cover multiple times. I would get an endorphin rush with every read, and not because of the occasional nude photos! I memorized the taxonomic names of animals and plants. I fantasized about visiting far-off lands and eating exotic foods. Wait a second… That’s what I do as an adult!

Well, the obvious would be that photography is a large component of my practice as an artist, but more significantly, these magazines fueled my desire to understand the relationship between people as individuals and in groups, especially as a function of culture.

I wanted to move people without them fully understanding why or how they were being moved. It’s a desire I still have. I like it when it happens to me, too! The lifestyle of the artist always attracted me, or at least what I imagined it to be. I was flipping through a book about Hundertwasser, and there was a small black-and-white photo of him standing at a vernissage, naked, in front of an audience. I thought to myself that I’d like to be that brave.

The process of photographing humans is very closely tied to my well-being, for reasons I don’t fully understand. There have been times that I go weeks without photographing someone, and my life inexplicably begins to unravel. 18 years ago, I found myself homeless. I’ve learned to catch things before they get out of control. The act of taking someone’s portrait for me is sacred. The resultant images aren’t part of the corpus of work I attribute to my artistic practice. It’s how I manage my own ego and gain a greater understanding of where I end and my subject begins, and vice versa.
In some ways, it’s much easier to photograph a stranger than someone familiar. From my perspective, everyone’s pretty much the same: vulnerable and sharing in the human experience. I work quickly, keeping the subject out of their own heads, so they don’t manage to manipulate the process. You know, it’s that quest for honesty. Despite the fact that sitting for a portrait in a studio is a contrivance, there is a type of honesty that presents itself as a function of not allowing artifice into the equation.
In a short time, I have to set my own ego aside as well, so that it doesn’t project onto the subject. The result is a vulnerable portrait of a human that reads as strength, because the moment I press the shutter release on the camera, there isn’t an attempt to mask the vulnerability. In fact, all the masks get removed. With celebrities and heads of industry, it’s not uncommon to find yourself confronted by world-class egos. I love it.

This can manifest in an emotional release.
I can remember an actor looking at his photo and then coming back to me almost in disbelief, saying, “I always wanted to be that guy, but never thought I could be, but now that I see him right there, I know I can be that guy.” I think what he was trying to say was that he didn’t have to lie anymore. The process can be very intimate, even if the whole thing happens in a few minutes. I get it. Like I said, it’s sacred.

While working with AI, one tends to come under its influence, and to some extent, we are forever changed. It can change the way you see the world. If you allow yourself to be consumed by the machine, your humanity can start to slip away. When I feel this happening, I go outside, take a deep breath, touch trees, speak to people, sit on the ground—anything at all—to come back into the body. This return to self can be very moving. It’s the reason I frequently finish generative works by moving to painting on canvas. There’s a fear of being subsumed by a type of machine consciousness and not being able to come back.

As a young artist, I was taken aback by the reaction of gallerists who saw my photographic work as being something outside of what art galleries showed. I was equally surprised that there were collectors of photography who didn’t collect any other medium. There has been a disconnect between the so-called traditional art world and the world of artists whose work overtly engages with technology. They speak different languages and might even have different objectives. It’s a comedy and a tragedy of errors. Despite the proliferation of generative art, brought about in no small part by the NFT boom during COVID, traditional institutions and galleries are largely lukewarm about showing this work. Yes, it’s a rejection that probably stems from a fear of the unknown. I imagined that as everyone walks around with a supercomputer in their pocket these days, living intimately with technology, this would change, but seeing that most people have no idea how their smart phones actually work, it’s not surprising that technologically-forward art is still marginalized. I work a lot these days with synthetic photography, which leverages AI. This emergent technology really polarizes people in a way that I find thrilling!

One of my metrics for success as an artist is to see how quickly people move from experiencing my work to engaging in meaningful conversations with each other about identity, value and truth. My AI work tends to challenge conventional notions of these three things, especially the truth. I have a body of work presented last year called CIVICS: 100 synthetic photographs of protest and civil disobedience from cities across the globe, generated from what we call diffusion models created by using AI algorithms that were trained on huge datasets of photographs—billions of photographs, including my own datasets of hundreds of thousands of images. Due to the way I use this technology, upon inspection, it is quite clear that the images are full of corruptions that reveal that the images were made using AI. Still, because most people have lost the ability to see, some become outraged when they find out the images are AI, even though I usually present them with an “AI” hashtag, but of course people don’t really read, either.

Comments range from “You are undermining the value of real photography” and “I can’t believe Instagram didn’t take this image down for being fake!” to “Truth is under attack!” One might surmise from the reaction of the public at large that this is the first time in history that truth in imagery has been challenged. Of course, photography by definition is a facsimile of the truth, and truth is not exactly concrete. I had the idea to make these images after seeing some of the greatest works of photojournalism featuring protesters, prisoners of war, refugees, etc. It became clear to me that even in the midst of horrific events playing out, or while people chanted in front of government buildings, appealing for human rights or legislative reform, the citizen intuitively knows what to do when the media pool shows up with their cameras. You crank it up a bit! You lay it on a bit thicker. You scream a bit louder. A bit more anguish in the face. You hold that flag up higher and wave it with even more enthusiasm. You puff your chest up, and if given the opportunity, you might consider placing a delicate flower in the barrel of a law enforcement officer’s rifle. You want to talk about the truth in photography? I do, and sometimes there’s more truth in an AI-generated photo than in a “real” photograph. When technology helps the artist hold a mirror to society in an undeniably meaningful and moving way, the art world cannot reject it.

The idea to tokenize myself in the form of 10,000,000 ERC-20 crypto-tokens on the Ethereum blockchain in January of 2018 was a response to feeling a bit commodified by the media. The sale of one of my photographic works (Potato #345 /2010) in late 2015 for a million euros was shared by the buyer at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with a journalist. Within a couple days, news outlets all over the world were reporting the story of the million-euro potato, and from that point on, people seemed to be more interested in the financial value of my work than the artistic value.

In a process that included having my blood drawn to connect my body in a meaningful way to the ten million artworks, collectively called “I AM A COIN,” I was able to have a bit of fun through self-commodification while using the blockchain itself as a medium. After CNN did a feature on me and this work in particular, I started receiving orders from San Francisco, Hong Kong, Berlin, etc. For some reason, people wanted to buy my IAMACOINS—not just one, but thousands. It became apparent that they were collecting these artworks as speculators rather than collectors. There are millions in circulation, and a couple times a year, I get PhD candidates who ask for interviews, which I usually agree to. It’s rather flattering, actually.

Weiwei saw an article about the blockchain work I was doing on the cover of the New York Times Art section, and he called me and said he wanted to better understand what the hell I was doing, so a couple weeks later, when I was back in Berlin, I gave him a crash course in the blockchain over lunch.

We decided to collaborate on a project called PRICELESS, tokenizing our shared moments together. Sharing Tea and Walking Down Schönhauser Allee among them. We made a series of prints that bore a string of hexadecimal characters representing a blockchain wallet, unique to each moment. We deposited a tiny fraction of the PRICELESS token in each wallet. There would be only 2 tokens, however, each divisible by 18 decimal places, but one would be locked away, inaccessible, while the other would be given away to friends. They were priceless. We were hoping to bring a bit more attention to the refugee crisis, particularly among the Rohingya people in Myanmar, by posing the question, “What is a human life worth?” Can you assign a price to life?

Sadly, I think people were more interested in the story of Ai Weiwei doing something on the blockchain than examining the value of human life. Academics and human rights activists took a more thorough look at the project. It’s hard to tell a story and make it exciting when you have to struggle just to get people to understand the technology used. In 2018, I would spend 20 minutes carefully explaining to people what the blockchain was and how it worked. 95% of the time, I was met with a confused expression.

It’s a mixed bag, really. I can point to dozens of examples of people whose lives have been changed in positive ways by NFTs, but statistically, not much has changed when you consider all those who came flocking to the NFT platforms, like the prospectors who traveled en masse to the Yukon in search of gold.

Blockchain’s implicit promise of democratizing access to opportunity and wealth has not exactly been borne out. There are considerable barriers to entry, and like traditional economies, there are gatekeepers. Big surprise! I’m one of the fortunate ones and am grateful for that, but as you can imagine, the community that sprung up around what sometimes feels like a pop-up casino leaves the majority feeling short-changed. As I said,