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.
1.0 Intro: Early Dialogues
An in-depth conversation with a curator 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
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. Diaphanous Portraits
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. Endings and Beginnings
This forward-looking reflection explores AI’s accelerating influence on artmaking and the evolving role of the artist. Southworth discusses the potential of new tools like MATR LABS, which use robotics and algorithms to materialize digital images in oil. What is the artist’s role in an AI-saturated world? How has AI changed the idea of appropriation?
5. In the Face of Another AI
An exploration of Southworth’s early AI works, where portraits became training data for machine learning. The chapter considers authorship, imperfect outputs, and what persists beyond the artist in generative image systems.
Bodies of work being considered for monograph
