DATE: 22-05-25
TIME: 22:34
TEXT: FIN COUSINS
DESIGN: RUBY BAILEY, PAULINE HILL
IMAGE COUNT: x
“Moore’s Law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future”.
– Charles Stross, Accelerando
It's been a while since I took my pulse. This was the intrusive thought that struck as Rachel Rossin walked me through her solo show The Totalists at Albion Jeune in West London. It came to me in the face of Telos (2025), a large oil canvas adorning the back wall, upon which a biomechanical heart sits front and centre, lipid smears surrounding its chrome core. The organ’s vessels are attached to an arch of tablets, each encasing ghostly apparitions in blemished shades. I can’t help but feel my own heart, thinking of the machines that once measured its cadence: stethoscopes and pulse oximeters, wearable monitors, the smell of a straining, old rubber armband. A mechanical flutter where heartbeat touches machine. What made me forget my body?
The Totalists is a series of oil paintings that spill and stick with machine and somatic parts; a slippery contrast, caught between fleshy impasto and photorealistic abstraction. The works brush Rossin’s signature vibrant colour palette – cobalts, vermilions, and viridian hues – beneath congealed metallic forms that glassily wing their way into frame. Media installation For the Totalists (2025) looms overhead, a parade of rotating bio-matter. Known for over a decade of pioneering responses to autonomy and technology, Rossin is fascinated by ‘the quickening’, the exhausting vertigo of change we experience as technology advances. Central to this is Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors on a microchip roughly doubles every two years, leading to exponential increases in computing power. In its wake, our comprehension of tech spirals into illegible, sensory abandon – a series of unending slippages between us and our black boxes. It’s no wonder a heartbeat feels redundant. There is nothing metronomic about the way this world works.
Rossin’s practice often reveals that this battle for autonomy is unfolding at a molecular level, deep in our memories and genetic code. In 2021, she made headlines for minting her own DNA as an NFT in Rachel Rossin’s Raw DNA. In 2024, she transposed her seven-year-old voice into the installation Haha Real, at Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern, trained from recovered home videos using AI techniques. For The Totalists, Rossin is working alongside an AI she calls SCRY-BORG, which she spent eight years programming and training exclusively on her artistic dataset, beginning with the drawings she was making at age five. Chimeric depictions emerge from this collaborative process between artist and her synthetic self. Brazen Head (2025) presents a wide-eyed self-portrait of Rossin as a young girl, clinging to a robotic arm. Geist Geist (2025), an intimate bodily entanglement, casts the human caught in a storm – a direct nod to William Blake’s Whirlwind of Lovers (1827). In the face of vast, incomprehensible technologies, these works assert art as a defiant act, a tool still capable of articulating and laying bare our relationship to digital logics.
Our current technocapitalist framework relies on bodies and grey matter to interconnect disparate systems and ensure the continuous flow of data, from payment platforms to feeds and apps. The human element feels like an impediment within this matrix: a disruption to an otherwise seamless order. After all, the system may rage on more efficiently without it. This quickening compels us to lose corporeal control – to surrender embodiment as if it were a cheap, gimmicky memory. Rossin is an artist who reminds us not to forget.
**This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.**
TWIST: Regarding Monolith (2025). What personal or historical perspectives on technology does it embody for you?
RACHEL ROSSIN: I began programming at age five. That’s how I first started creating artwork, using a command-line interface. This doesn't mean I was actually programming, but rather that I could understand the evolution from the command line as the back end to the front-end interfaces we use today. It was like a second language to me. It was how I understood creativity. There was never a distinction for me between digital media and just creation itself.
TWIST: You've previously talked about this as a distinction between the cursor and your own hand.
RR: Oh, yeah. I think that's a good analogue. Because as we evolve with technology, there are these things we forget. For instance, my beloved and I were just reading on my way over here about the evolution of the wheel.
In Monolith, the charcoal horses offer a way to talk about the domestication of animals, which was a force multiplier for the continents of Europe and Asia. Whereas you didn't have the wheel in the Americas. So, you see why the New World, from the Old World's perspective, was so distinctly different. What was happening in Europe and Asia is shocking. Here, the horses can be pinned as one of the first technologies of a human being: it helps me think about technology and the human body as this constellation: satellites, or peripherals – the way we extend ourselves into the things we're co-evolving with.
It extends to the choice of material. You have the gesso and the ground. Then the very top is this monolith, in a highly digital, glossy texture, partly made with SCRY-BORG, this synthetic version of myself. And then, the idea of looking back to civilisations from 3000 years ago is the obelisk. It's partially eroded; it gives you an expansive feeling of time.
TWIST: When I first encountered your work, there were comparisons between your process and Maria Lassnig's body consciousness: that technical translation of internal bodily sensation and self-perception into artworks. How has this methodology evolved over time? Are you still drawn to this practice? Is it present here?
RR: That was around 2017. I wrote a short artist statement on my Substack that referred to this comparison. Maria Lassnig's background – people often don't know this – but the way she was making money in New York during the Pictures Generation was by doing early CG animation. She spent a lot of time in front of the computer.
Lassnig worked with Gretchen Bender, they were contemporaries. She moved back to Vienna because she couldn't deal with the attraction to offloading herself. You can see this in her work: she's often part machine. So, I was definitely inspired by that and had already been engaged in a similar practice. When someone showed me her work, I wanted to pay homage to her. I think it's a natural thing to do when you work in technology. You start to wonder where you’re located. I realise I can no longer remember phone numbers or navigate cities how I used to – or perhaps the way I feel I should. I've become completely dependent on these technologies.
I don't love this point by McLuhan, but I'll say it because it's top of mind: he talked about how, for every technology we develop, we make an amputation on ourselves. We take away a part of ourselves and put it into this other thing. The idea of cloud computing is a nice analogy for how and where things are located.
TWIST: I wanted to ask about Telos. For much of this exhibition, the body feels extremely occupied. This organ takes the sense of occupation much further.
RR: It's thinking about where the body is, and the technology coming next that we're not properly prepared for, which is biocomputing: being able to program living cells, to make computers out of our own material – Cronenberg level – and that's already happening. Harvard labs have body-on-chips. Computers made from neurons already exist. I just saw the first living computer being sold; it's already at market.
TWIST: It's interesting that you’re turning to Moore’s Law. What makes Moore's Law a relevant touchstone for you?
RR: Because it's proven true. What was predicted back in 1965, that's the substrate, the physical foundation for what everything's built on: silicon chips, right? That's the processor speed. That's how fast things can move. So, the actual physical capacity for how fast things can move is constrained by the chips we produce. And so, with Moore's Law, it's amazing, it’s so dumb... it's exponential.
Obviously, you feel old as you grow older, that's just the process of accruing time. It's a natural thing. And you might think, “oh, is it because of aging that everything feels so fast?” But no, it's science-based: it feels faster because it is actually moving faster. And that's a phenomenon that was coined – it's not well known – but it was referred to as the quickening.
TWIST: I’m fascinated by this, because so many artists and writers are obsessed with accelerationism right now. It seems to be everywhere. But you turn away from that particular term.
RR: I prefer the quickening over accelerationism, which I feel has its moorings in trying to hasten things. For me, the quickening is more about our literacy with the technology we depend on. It's a term I feel I can own, instead of it carrying all the baggage that accelerationism does. I feel that for most people, they don't understand what accelerationism is. I think it lacks a clear definition.
Whereas quickening reminds me of something biological. For me, that communicates more clearly. It's a term I'd rather hold onto because it's related to Moore's Law and an Art Bell opinion piece in the New York Times, that's how the term was popularised in the 90s, before it fell out of fashion. Bell makes all these predictions about how we’d be living today, and they're completely accurate. Because what's shocking about many things, including Moore's Law, is that when you graph exponential growth, it becomes very easy to predict where things are headed. It's essentially a statistical model.
TWIST: Another thing that fascinates me, perhaps in terms of playing with ideological boundaries, is this show’s title. Perhaps it’s the “-ists” suffix. Who are The Totalists?
RR: I’m going to speak in somewhat corny, sincere terms. It's a way to anthropomorphise something that just feels so vast. I often use a hurricane, or something that feels completely outside of your control, in large-scale new media installations, because it evokes that feeling of not being able to truly consent to forces so much larger than you are.
When I was thinking about the state of the world – my work isn't really political, but things inherently become political, right? Especially when you're talking about things at such a large scale. So that's where the title comes from: relating to technology in that way. There are elements concerning black boxes in psychology, which are present here, and that also feels like something so vast, beautiful, and scary. Then there are other emotional components. But mostly, I'm talking about technology and myself.
TWIST: Can you talk about SCRY-BORG, and the processes and inspiration behind feeding your dataset into this program?
RR: I've been training it for eight years. It was never something I was interested in showing other people because I thought it would be fun to have a conversation with myself as a five-year-old, or just kind of see what that was like. I essentially ripped out the guts of AlphaFold, DeepMind’s predictive modelling for protein folding. The programming for what we're seeing is sort of like the back-end programming for how I have this little golem thing that can shape-shift, but only within my visual language.
The process was very slow. At the beginning, it was more akin to how a text-based DALL-E works; it didn't feel alive. But then there were enough repositories I could borrow from. I thought, “I can build this from the ground up, or I can wait about a year, and this will exist. I'll be able to borrow someone's code who's figured this out in a much better way, and instead of taking me six months, I can just wait eight months, and it'll come out”. And sure enough, that's what happened.
So, you have all the math, right? The analogy would be our experiences, our memories – that's the data I've been collecting and feeding and training these visual models with. And when doing this, you also have to create points of reference. I'm using the span of my entire life and experiences. I wanted to understand the age we're entering because I think we're all taking for granted the process of training these models and what the actual scraping of the data looks like... it's unbelievable. The Anthropic founder said something that I think is shocking but so true, and I understand what he means. He said we're only creating the environments to grow these large language models; we don't actually know how they work. But we're still in a place of luxury because our technology is still separate. We're able to leave our technology in another room and not be subject to late-stage capitalism.
TWIST: There’s a recurring tension in your work between these kinds of black boxes and technology, and your personal life and upbringing. I’m thinking of The Siblings (2025) here.
RR: I'm from Florida, and I grew up in a very violent place, at the corner of Gun Club and Military Trail. My life growing up was extremely chaotic and violent. We were all thrown into that environment and witnessed a lot. That's what this painting is about: the emotional black boxes of our lives. And how it feels like our dependency on technology and our lack of literacy around it grow proportionately, in direct relationship to each other. That gap just feels like it's getting wider and wider. Not just psychological black boxes, but those related to technology.
But that also relates to our own presence, our understanding of each other and ourselves. That's completely true for me, because I definitely needed technology growing up to deal with my situation.
TWIST: I understand you've been digitally recovering an archive of material from your childhood for years. Was there a recovery process involved in this?
RR: Not in that sense. Every day I do these body awareness exercises, or I make drawings rooted in meditation or presence. This work started with me drawing four people over and over again. And I didn't realise it initially. Because the beautiful thing about mindfulness practices, and a lot of art making, is that you kind of step aside. It's not your conscious mind, but your subconscious that then ends up saying things you weren't fully aware you wanted to talk about. When I had almost finished this painting, a friend walked in. He said, “that's you and your siblings”. And I looked back at the drawings and thought, “oh yes, it is”.
TWIST: As if you become a vessel. As though you’d been prompted...
RR: Yes. And what's interesting is looking at the formal way these works look – it brings me back to the drawings I was making as a five-year-old: these ASCII, strange compositions, and me making drawings on top of them and then trying to print on top of them again. It’s this impossible thing. It's a Deleuzian contradiction.
TWIST: I'm interested by this uncovering process. Because in so much of culture right now, the world feels so illusory. Critics talk about this moment as a medieval time, or as a period where spirituality or astrology feels credible: we’re obsessed with the idea that we can enact some form of pattern recognition. This exhibition feels concerned with that pareidolia.
RR: It's so interesting. AI becomes this techno-romantic thing. I think the reason so many people actually believe in astrology has a lot to do with that same impulse.
TWIST: What do you think that is?
RR: I think we're looking for meaning. I think we all feel really unmoored and afraid. I think we want something more. Judeo-Christianity doesn't make sense anymore, but pagan religions from before seem to resonate more. But we're not going to revive Zeus, you know. So, astrology feels like the closest thing we can do. It's a kind of decentralised system. Astrology is the closest thing we have that addresses synchronicities; it's very Jungian.
But the fact that people look to AI for that kind of direction is fascinating. That's the joke of black boxes: you know, everyone says the computer's racist. And you realise... it's us. It's trained on 4chan. That's the data for many of those chatbots; they're trained on numerous message boards.
There's a neuroscience term for this: the online disinhibition effect, which is linked to the shrinking of our hippocampus, caudate, and thalamus. It has a similar effect on the brain as heavy drug addiction. And the explanation is so fucking good because it's purely about us. It explains why people act so badly online. I always wondered why that was, and it's because without embodiment, without seeing people face-to-face, your amygdala is functionally too close to the surface. Embodiment gives you the space to think before you speak, act, or are cruel. So, our nervous systems, our personalities, need to be functionally slowed down for us to act humanely.
I just thought, “oh my god, we're not talking about this!” It feels so upsetting because I don't want it to be true. I want us to be capable of being humane to each other. But without bodies, we're not able to do that.
TWIST: You've talked about how you consume a lot of content, or doomscroll and chase dopamine hits. I guess what I find interesting is that despite this inclination, whenever I look at your work, it always seems to be connected to, or yearn for, landscape.
RR: There's a reason for that. The scientific word for the experience of awe is “perceptual vastness”. That's the feeling that I get from looking at great works of art. An oceanic feeling. Perceptual vastness is connected to Carl Sagan's speech about the pale blue dot, and that feeling that can make you cry with gratitude when you see something overwhelmingly beautiful. Regarding the difference between that quickness of content and more substantial material: I love that fast stuff too; Sonic the Hedgehog has definitely ended up in my work, you know. And I love it, especially when I'm working very close to digital media. For example, there's a piece I made called Man Mask – so long ago now – where I ripped apart Call of Duty, and it's all landscapes.
It's cool. I like that stuff. And I think what you're referring to are the different resolutions or ways of engaging with it, right? Because I'm not just doing a sort of pastiche of the internet, despite being enmeshed in it. For example, I don’t really share memes.
TWIST: No, your work is not very memetic.
RR: It's more romantic. For me, my decision not to speak with direct pastiche from the internet, meme logic, or popular culture – even though I love and giggle at the scroll – is because it ultimately feels boring to me. Something about using that direct pastiche feels like... fashion? Passing fashion. I don’t mind when elements of it leak in, as with Call of Duty or Sonic or whatever, but mostly I want my landscapes, my content, my myth-making – whatever it is – to come from me, not to be directed by my reptile brain. I feel I’m too enmeshed in and dependent on the totality of something outside my control already. I wonder if I find that direct pastiche boring because it feels like some Kardashian-level advertising bit I’m being sold. James Joyce said there are two types of bad art: didactic and advertising. I mostly agree.
TWIST: You've always traced technological movements with such precision, and your work is constantly shifting. But there's a quote from you I loved so much: “the work doesn’t change, it just looks different. The heart is still there”. With the quickening, do you worry you'll ever lose that? Do you worry the heart will go?
RR: Yes. But the reason that I keep coming back to definitions is because I don't think the technology would do that to me. I think that I could lose myself. And I think that we're all at risk of losing ourselves if we don't pay attention.
I think everyone has their own different ways of finding out who they are for themselves. Everyone has what their actual core is. I know that this is my actual core. And you'll stop making art if you get picked up by that stream, you know. Because what you're saying is, what are your landscapes? What's the truest part of you? And that should always be able to change because we're always changing, especially with how fast things are moving. So, the beautiful thing is being honest enough and present enough to be like, oh, I'm here.
TWIST: It's affect?
RR: Yeah, it is affect. It's like, where am I? Right now, this is exactly what I needed to be making. For the times that we're in and why it feels like it's more rooted in the body and painting. And that is the material of the body. That's my relationship to painting, always. You're working in lipids and things that feel like hormones. That’s what painting is. It’s just a record of an artist's time. It's an extension of their nervous system.