John Slepian: The Kiss

John Slepian creates digital installations that investigate what it is that makes us feel human. His simplified forms exhibit identifiable gestures that have illicit emotional responses.

The Kiss consists of two monitors depicting two forms that are trying against all odds to kiss each other. For more than five years John Slepian has created digitally generated photographs, video installations, and interactive computer installations that investigate what it is that makes us feel human – something, according to Slepian, that is becoming harder and harder to delineate in this world of rapidly advancing, and often shifting technologies. His works depict organic forms that are apparently derived from the human body. Though enormously simplified, they exhibit identifiable gestures and behaviors. As Slepian explains, “They are intended to elicit an awareness of the disjunctions that can occur between one’s emotional and intellectual reactions, and thereby provoke in the viewer a consideration of the process through which we come to identify with the objects of our gaze.”