In The Screen I Am Everything | bitforms gallery

text by Valerie Amend

In The Screen I Am Everything introduces Ellie Pritts’ recursive practice of working with technology in iterative stages. The exhibition presents new works that combine analog video, glitch aesthetics, self-portraiture, and AI-collaborative imagery. Printed portraits, polychromatic flowers, wallpaper murals, and hypnotic video share insight into the artist’s dazzling world of colorful possibility.

In The Screen I Am Everything acts as a throughline of Pritts’ recurrent technique of integrating her own video and photos with advancing AI systems. The Glitch Fleur series begins with modular video synthesis where the artist manipulates the cadence, pattern, and hue of an analog video stream. Pritts blends footage of real flowers with glitch responses in a dynamic oscillation that gestures towards Pop Art’s bright colors and graphic visuals.

Prints from the Glitch Fleur series immortalize moments within each video’s progression, savoring unique moments of stillness. Each component of this series—a wallpaper mural, prints, and video—acts as technicolor effigy of the artist’s own dreamscape. Citing an intense curiosity surrounding evolving technology and its impact on the creative process, Pritts moves between virtual and physical space with an electrifying similitude that invites the viewer to glimpse into her interior world.

Divine Recursions are a series of self-portraits that encapsulate the artist’s ongoing relationship with self-portraiture. After experiencing reduced mobility in her hands due to a neurological condition, Pritts was unable to use techniques such as painting and drawing and began looking for alternative systems of creating visual art. In 2020, the artist embarked on her first digital self-portraits.

The Divine Recursions series established what is now a recursive workflow that incorporates the artist’s photography, text prompts from personal journals, and AI learning models developed to generate images. Within each portrait, in-progress images are extracted and returned to AI in a repetitive rhythm that abstracts and stylizes each output. Applying this treatment to the artist’s own self-portraits illuminated unexpected characteristics that imbued her likeness with attributes of strength and courage. The accessibility of AI tools is an important factor of Pritts’ practice—one she hopes can inspire others to create in new ways. Recursion is an intrinsic component of this series as it allows Pritts to expertly train her AI models and accommodate new features within rapidly developing AI technology. Elements from Divine Recursions are often revisited and transformed into new works. Pritts’ attention expanding technologies allow each work to act as an artifact of its time.

In The Screen I Am Everything is the title video from where the exhibition gets its name. As a metaphor and attitude for much of Pritts’ work, the video celebrates the screen as a playground without the boundaries of physical reality. In creating this video, Pritts first filmed herself in front of a green screen. Text prompts from her journals were combined with AI and used to generate the environments of each scene. In these varied states of being, the artist embodies different characters. While the title of this artwork alludes to the possibility and potential of digital space, In the Screen I Am Everything is presented as a possibility, a call for presentness and potential.