Monograph: Giving in to the Algorithm, 2026
Giving in to the Algorithm is a forthcoming monograph by conceptual artist Travis LeRoy Southworth, tracing two decades of work across digital portraiture, algorithmic aesthetics, and contemporary image culture. Shaped by his background in photo retouching, a residency connected to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, and early experiments with machine learning, the book reflects on artmaking in an age of algorithmic labor and argues for the enduring importance of imperfection and ambiguity.
This preview represents an in-progress layout designed to help bring the monograph to completion—an invitation to future collaborators, funders, and supporters of digital art and its evolving histories.
Current outline of the book: 200+ pages, 8.5 x 10 inches (21 x 25 cm), coated, soft cover.
Managing Editor: Eleonora Brizi
Structure
The book is organized around dialogue, tracing how images and their systems shape selfhood, value, and belonging. I use the term in both its philosophical and technical senses: as a form of inquiry shaped through multiple voices, and as an interface through which humans and machines exchange signals, prompts, and commands. The book unfolds as a network of conversations between artist and image, human and machine, signal and noise, authorship and automation.
0.0 Forward: by Eleonora Brizi
Introduction to the book format surrounding dialogue, images and their systems.
1.0 Early Dialogues
An in-depth conversation with a curator/writer sets the tone for the book, offering insight into Southworth’s practice and evolving relationship with digital media. Through thoughtful questions and reflective answers, the dialogue explores identity, authorship, and what is an algorithm. It provides personal context and invites readers into the conceptual landscape behind the artworks.
Detouched, Absent Minded Monotonous Splendor, Where I End and You Begin, Figural Moments
2.0 Pixels and Particles: Interview by Alex Estorick
This section traces Southworth’s journey from professional photo retoucher to artist-in-residence in Switzerland traveling to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. It examines how his early manipulation of digital images and exposure to particle physics reshaped his understanding of visual representation. The fusion of aesthetic and scientific inquiry becomes a foundation for his later AI-based work.
3.0 Diaphanous Portraits: Essay by Brian Droitcour
Rooted in subtle color and gesture, these works embrace ambiguity and dissolve traditional notions of portraiture. Southworth draws from his airbrushing techniques and retouching background to explore softness, distortion, and impermanence. The section highlights how the blurry, in-between states of these faces evoke a poetic presence and emotional resonance. Also explore early days of blockchain.
4.0 Endings and Beginnings: Essay by Danielle Ezzo
This section considers the shifting location of artistic labor as images move from retouching and machine learning into AI-assisted and robotically materialized forms. Works such as New Beginnings, Old Endings, Secrets Secreting and Thresholds explore synthetic portraiture, imperfection, memory, and the unstable boundary between artist and algorithm. The section looks toward emerging tools like MATR Labs not as a rupture, but as another stage in a longer question: where does the artist’s hand reside when images are generated, altered, translated, and physically produced by machines?
5.0 Final Conversations
The final chapter turns from images toward language, considering how AI reshapes dialogue, memory, and the possibility of a final exchange. Through works that imagine last conversations, afterlives, and machine-mediated forms of address, the chapter asks what persists beyond the artist when language itself becomes generative.
Bodies of work being considered for monograph
