Where the Edges Go

Where the Edges Go is an AI-generated video exploring the fluid boundaries between past and present, self and environment, through mirroring, liquid distortion, and visual ambiguity. The work originates from a 2016 photograph of OnaArtist — Schrager’s long-running “celebrity as art practice” persona — standing in the doorway of a rented RV in the American Southwest. It was her first encounter with the desert, a place she would later move to in 2022.

The piece asks what it means to visit versus inhabit a vast and elusive space — whether the physical desert, the digital cloud, or one’s own reflection. The liquid distortions echo Schrager’s early experiments with Photoshop’s liquify tool, in which she manipulated self-portraits as both subject and material. A decade later, that same image is reprocessed through AI.

Presented within the format of a Speed Show — recalling the temporality of the internet café — the work frames this return as both technological and personal. Viewed on a public computer, the image becomes a site of re-entry: What does it mean to revisit the self ten years later? Where does the internet sit between then and now? And where, finally, do the edges go?