Objectophilia and the Making of Presence

In 2018, I gathered small ceramic animals that had already lived one life as possessions. I found them in thrift stores, where they had become inexpensive, unwanted things. I photographed them, printed their images on translucent film, built frames around them, and introduced light, sound, and movement. I wanted a viewer to hesitate before deciding what was alive, what was merely animated, and why the distinction felt consequential. Objectophilia (Animals) was a photography thesis, but its subject was the moment a thing begins to seem capable of looking back.

I wrote then that the relationship between the intimate and the inanimate was the center of the work. I still believe that. What has changed is the range of systems capable of producing an apparent presence, and my ability to name the decisions that bring one into being. Artificial intelligence gives this older question another form. It does not answer it.

The animal before the image

The figurines were not neutral raw material. Their expressions were already designed to invite affection. A rabbit’s eyes, a dog’s posture, a bird’s bright color: each belonged to a language of cheap, repeatable tenderness. Their manufacture had anticipated a buyer’s response before I encountered them. They had also survived purchase, ownership, and disposal. I could see wear and age in some of them, but I could not know who had held them or why they were given away. That missing history was part of their force.

I called them “rescues from the land of forgotten toys.” That phrase is sentimental, and deliberately so. Their innocence is a lure. The same object that suggests a child’s attachment also carries the facts of mass production and consumer desire. The figurine is sweet and faintly grotesque at once. My work begins in that discomfort. I do not need to invent a lost child or a previous owner to make it poignant. I need to let the uncertainty remain visible.

The first act of authorship was choosing which object could bear this tension. Another artist could have found the same rabbit and made a different work, or no work at all. Selection did not make its material history disappear. It began a new history alongside it.

A photograph with a body

A photograph often persuades us to look through its surface toward a subject. In Objectophilia I tried to interrupt that habit. I made photographs of objects and then made those photographs into objects again. Translucent film, a custom frame, a light source, and the depth of the enclosure affected what the viewer could see and when. The frame was not a neutral border. It was part of the thing being encountered.

This matters because an image is never only its depicted content. A bright surface can call across a room. A small object asks a person to approach. A sound heard before its source is seen changes the next image one meets. The physical choices govern attention and expectation. They can make an ordinary figurine seem lonely, threatening, watchful, or impossibly close. None of those sensations proves that the figurine feels anything. They show that the viewer does.

Two pieces in the thesis speak to one another from around a gallery corner. They are near enough to hear but unable to see each other. One asks why “these people” put them that way and finally calls the people animals. The scene depends on architecture as much as on dialogue. Move the pieces face to face and the exchange loses its wound. Remove the voices and their separation may go unnoticed. The meaning is made through the arrangement and the viewer’s discovery of it.

Who makes the encounter

Duchamp’s snow shovel interested me because its designation as art could be disturbed by something as simple as using it to clear snow. Its status changes with the action, the place, and the person who encounters it. The question is still useful, but it is incomplete if it treats the artist’s choice as a magic word. In Objectophilia the found animal is indispensable. So are the exposure, scale, color, frame, circuitry, timing, sound, and placement. The work cannot be explained by saying that I chose a figurine. I made a set of relationships around it.

The same precision is needed when an image is generated with AI. A prompt can initiate a result without accounting for every decision inside the resulting image. A model, its training, the interface, and its constraints participate in what appears. The person using it may accept the first output or may set a rule, generate a range, reject almost all of it, alter what remains, and build a sequence or physical situation that changes how it is read. Those are different artistic acts. The presence of a tool neither guarantees authorship nor cancels it.

For my own work, I want to be able to identify the decisions that matter and say what would change if I had decided otherwise. Why this object? Why this image? Why this degree of response? Why a screen behind a photograph instead of a visible screen? Why a silence here? If I put my name on the work, I should be able to defend those choices. The test is not whether my hand touched every part. It is whether I made a proposition specific enough to be examined and whether I accepted responsibility for what the work does.

The material that resists

The 2018 work used electronic devices, but its illusion depended on stubborn physical things: ceramic, film, wood, paint, a corner of a room. Material did more than lend authenticity to an idea. It determined how the illusion could be built and where it would fail. A photograph could glow because it was translucent. The framed object could seem inhabited because a light source sat behind it. The viewer could hear a voice before locating its body because sound crossed the gallery differently from sight.

I remain interested in that resistance. Concrete can carry weight and enclose something that still operates. Porcelain can break when someone seeks the fortune inside it. A camera and a screen can offer a view of another person while withholding the direct encounter. These are possibilities in my current work, each with a different cost. Weight must be supported. A broken object cannot be put back as it was. A mediated view tells the truth of one camera position while hiding everything outside it. The material is not decoration added after the idea. It is where the idea meets a limit and acquires consequences.

AI can expand the number of possible images at extraordinary speed. That abundance does not remove the need for such limits. A work still requires a form, duration, site, sequence, or rule through which someone can encounter it. Sometimes the useful decision is to make an image. Sometimes it is to refuse another one, print the selected image, let it fade, put it behind glass, interrupt it with sound, or make it impossible to possess. Craft decides which possibilities count.

The mind we supply

In the thesis I used animism to describe our readiness to give objects feelings and intentions. I also described the reciprocity that allows a person to love an object as imagined. That word matters more to me now. The viewer can have an authentic emotional experience without the object having a corresponding inner life. A responsive machine complicates the experience because it can answer, remember within a system, or appear to anticipate us. Its observable behavior and our inference about a mind are separate matters. I cannot settle consciousness by staging a convincing encounter, and I do not need to.

What I can test is how little information allows the mind to complete what it cannot directly perceive. A flicker behind an eye. A voice heard from the other side of a wall. The delay between an action and a response. A picture that seems to know where the viewer is standing. Each can produce presence without explaining its source. With AI, those cues can become more adaptive and more persuasive. This gives the artist more control over the conditions of belief, along with a responsibility to consider what the viewer is being led to believe.

The distinction also protects the strangeness of the work. If I claim that a thing is alive, the viewer is left to test that claim. If I arrange an encounter in which the viewer momentarily feels it might be, the viewer must notice their own participation. That gap between knowledge and feeling is where Objectophilia has always lived.

After the encounter

Near the end of the 2018 thesis I wrote, “The experience is the art.” I would now add that the experience is constructed, but never fully controlled. I can select an object, make an image, build an apparatus, write a line of dialogue, and decide what a viewer encounters first. I cannot dictate the memory a person brings to a ceramic rabbit or guarantee that fear becomes sympathy. The work is completed in a meeting between those conditions and a particular mind.

This is why the animals still matter to me. They are not primitive versions of artificial beings awaiting a more advanced machine. They are cheap, breakable objects that reveal how readily we make company from what surrounds us. They also reveal how much an artist can do with a modest signal and a carefully chosen place for it to appear. The question I began with has grown sharper: when something seems to look back, what did I make, what did the viewer supply, and what remains in the dark between us?

Source note

This essay extends Jonathan Vasata, Objectophilia (Animals), MFA thesis, Savannah College of Art and Design, May 2018, especially pp. 3–4, 8–14, 19–20, and 26–28. Its discussion of conceptual art and AI also develops ideas in Vasata, Conceptual Art Exhibition Space and AI, revised working draft, September 2026. The archived thesis remains a separate 2018 work.