In Conversation: Florence Alwajih on Digital Accidents, Identity, and Representation
- Amy Jiang
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
In the feedback loops of machine learning, certain bodies, cultures, and ways of knowing are made visible, distorted, or erased. Like ghosts—excluded yet ever-present—they haunt the machine. They slip through algorithmic blind spots, bend systems’ logic, and disrupt with glitches and ruptures that unsettle computational control. But ghosts don’t just haunt—they rewire. They assert presence, reframe meaning, and speak in forms the system was never trained to understand. Through cracks in the loop, they reemerge as designers of new imaginaries for themselves and for the communities the system failed to see. Ghosts in the Feedback Loop is a virtual exhibition that invites artists to work inside those cracks—to treat algorithmic systems not as endpoints of automation but as haunted infrastructures alive with memory, loss, and rebellion. This interview is part of TechnoMirage, UAAD’s latest curatorial & publishing project exploring the intersections of artificial intelligence, speculative design, and collective imagination. Emerging from a multi-format event series—including a virtual exhibition, an online panel co-hosted with Parsons, and an IRL gathering of workshops, talks, and performances—the publication extends these dialogues into an archival form.
About the Artists

Florence is a digital colorist, alongside a personal and instinctive digital art practice.
Her work revolves around the body—her own and others’—using tools like scanning, glitching, and layering to explore how technology can distort, reclaim, or reframe physical presence. Years of navigating body image struggles, disconnection, and dissociation deeply inform her approach, where imperfections and digital accidents become a language in themselves.
Her aesthetic is shaped by a deep understanding of light, texture, and emotional tone. She brings this sensitivity into her art, where bodies appear fragmented, glitched, and stretched—not beautified, but made visible in new, sometimes unsettling ways.
Her practice explores the tension between the technical and the intimate, the artificial and the real. Through digital manipulation, she creates space for uneasy or incomplete images and invites viewers to reconsider how we see, inhabit, and narrate the body.
Q: Could you tell us a bit about your background, and how your work connects to the theme “Ghosts in the Feedback Loop”?
Before shifting to digital arts, I was a colorist in cinema and advertising. Now my work revolves around the body and the way technological errors carve out new, fragile layers of identity. With BINGO—a grid of one hundred faces, ninety-nine generated by AI and one real—the ghostly presence becomes tangible: the viewer searches for what is human but gets lost in algorithmic fictions. It echoes the exhibition theme by revealing how systems simultaneously produce visibility and erasure.
Q: How do you perceive AI—as a tool, a collaborator, a medium, a subject, or something else? And how does that shape your artistic process?
I see AI as both a tool and a trickster. I don’t think it should be used as a direct generator of art, but rather as a secondary tool to expand certain horizons, always with an awareness of its questionable nature. It introduces unexpected distortions and errors, and that unpredictability became part of my process for Bingo: I let it disrupt my intentions and reveal things I didn’t plan.
The only reason I return to AI in my practice is to question it—to expose its flaws and the way it quickly reveals its own obsolescence when confronted with human imagination. For me, AI is less a source of creation than a mirror of its own limits. It carries the biases and value systems of its creators, offering only a partial, sometimes skewed, view of humanity.

Q: What futures does your featured work gesture toward or warn against? Who do you imagine as your audience, and how do you hope they are impacted?
BINGO gestures toward a deeper understanding of what it means to be “you.” What allows others to recognize you beyond surface traits? Can identity be detached from appearance alone? It also warns against the instability of recognition—what happens when human presence becomes indistinguishable from synthetic invention. Identity carries inherited values, traditions, and memories, a weight that AI can never fully grasp or replicate. I imagine the audience as active participants: they look, compare, guess, and fail. Even my own parents failed to recognize my real face in the grid, and I hope this moment of doubt prompts viewers to reflect on how fragile identity becomes within artificial processes.
Q: Are there particular communities, histories, or environments your work remains in conversation with? How do those relationships evolve over time?
My work is in constant friction with the weight of normative representations—those rigid images of what a face or body should look like—and with the invisibility imposed on people who exist outside official narratives. It also reflects the stark contrast between the ease of generating a hundred synthetic identities and the limited possibilities some people have to legally exist as citizens. The real face in the grid is one I photographed myself for my passport, linking strict bureaucratic identity to algorithmic multiplicity. Finally, it remains in conversation with the machines themselves: their glitches, their blind spots, their strange ways of denying us. These tensions evolve over time, but they always return to the same question: who gets to be seen, and on whose terms?
Q: What do you see as the most urgent threats or uncertainties we may face in the coming decade with the rise of AI?
The most urgent threat is not only disinformation but the erosion of trust in images and identities. When everything can be fabricated, recognition itself becomes unstable. Another danger lies in whose bodies and stories get excluded or distorted by these systems—who gets seen, and who is overlooked. Beyond that, there is the absurdity of granting “life” to machines while basic human rights are neglected. Technological progress often tramples human fragility instead of supporting it, and that imbalance feels like the true ghost haunting our future.
Q: Are there any theories, books, or artists you’d like to recommend in your current areas of interest?
Lately, I’ve been inspired by Arvida Byström’s In the Clouds, which repurposes a tool originally designed to “punish” women for the pleasure of the male gaze, revealing its truly monstrous potential.
Rosie Gibbens is another major influence—her performances use sharp, playful humor to expose the absurd pressures of consumerist norms on the human body.
I’ve also drawn inspiration from Magritte’s Le Viol and his explorations of reality and perception, questioning what happens when elements of desire are placed where they are not supposed to be. Does it still count as an object of desire? And does a face remain itself even when certain traits are altered?
Lead Editor: Amy Xiaofan Jiang
Assistant Editor: Paridhi Garg
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