AMBIPHILIA

Pictures for practising ambivalence skills

work in progress (2022 – ongoing) 

AI-generated images (Stable Diffusion, Paint Hua and Invoke AI), installation (wallpaper and prints, Hahnemühle Photorag)

Based on the strong reactions to the HUNGER series, I am experimenting with amplifying the ambivalent “push/pull” feelings triggered by the series in a new work. The viewers should be repelled and attracted to the image content at the same time. The contrasts should be even stronger, even further apart. Plastic meets physicality, confectionery meets pornography, and eroticism meets disgust. AI makes a world possible in which orgasm and nausea coincide.

For psychologists, being able to endure ambivalent feelings is a sign of psychological maturity. Maturity that is shown in the fact that attraction and repulsion can be experienced simultaneously without having to resort to simplistic pigeonholing.

Ambiphilia is the antonym of ambivalence conflict – a neologism that describes being attracted to opposites.

To endure ambivalence is to prepare well for life. To claim ambivalence is to embrace the world in its complexity. The ambiphilic person is a being who not only endures opposites and contradictions but affirms them and enthusiastically exclaims, “More of this!”