Echoes from the Source is a collaborative exhibition by Zen Cohen and Dana Potter that examines video environments as self-referential systems shaped by human attention, responsiveness, and intervention. Working with algorithms, collage, code, and generative processes, both artists explore how contemporary visual culture operates through cycles of repetition, mutation, and amplification. The exhibition positions video not only as a medium for spectacle, but as an unstable ecosystem in which humans and moving images continuously reshape one another through feedback, desire, and recursive transformation.

I’ve Decided the Internet Is Making Me Insane by Dana Potter is a five-channel video installation composed from screen recordings of Instagram Reels. Each one-minute video layers fragments of algorithmically recommended content from a newly created burner account—cleaning videos, makeup tutorials, fidget toys, and other visually optimized media—into hypnotic kaleidoscopic collages. Through rotoscoping and mirroring, recognizable objects and gestures dissolve into overstimulating patterns of color, texture, and motion.

The work considers how visual media is evolving in a reciprocal relationship with human attention. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan posits how domesticated plants adapted to appeal to human desires. The idea that domestication is a two-way street where humans become the agents for the plants reproductive success. Certain products, actions, and editing styles have evolved with us on Instagram and become economic successes because of their visually desirability. The kaleidoscopic effect emphasizes how social media content mutates toward maximum visual stimulation in an attention economy. Presented on iPads within the gallery, the installation reflects the intimate scale of social media consumption while amplifying its seductive and dystopian spectacle.

Oracle Machine by Zen Cohen is a totemic response to the acceleration of machine learning, the immense scale of digital images it produces, and the extractive infrastructures that sustain this proliferation. The work reflects on the shifting role of the human collaborator within this ritual of hyperproduction—as both conduit and disturbance, poking at the signal, in search of meaning.

This exhibition presents video recordings and printed artifacts from previous iterations of the project. In those previous installations, a monitor was positioned beneath a suspended endoscope, encased in rose quartz—a material historically associated with healing and divination. This configuration references the dowsing pendulum, framing the apparatus as both sensing device and speculative oracle while producing a live video feedback loop between camera and screen.

Participants were invited to intervene in this system by moving their hands beneath the camera to subtly modulate the feedback signal. The interactions were further mediated through TouchDesigner, which composited live feedback with prerecorded footage of water bodies and landscapes found across the Southeast. 

Through its iterative process of echoing images, Oracle Machine operates as a generative system—part divination tool, part image machine—where meaning emerges through recursion, interference, and the unstable boundary between haptics and automated production.