Artist Statement

John Holmes is a media artist whose practice investigates how technological systems reshape intimacy, perception, and desire. Working across sculpture, installation, video, collage, and performance, he merges hand-built objects with custom software and interactive environments. His works blur the line between material and immaterial, treating light, sound, and software as sculptural elements alongside metal, resin, and paper. Holmes uses technology as both material and metaphor, drawing attention to how it scripts the ways people see and relate.

Central to his practice is the reversal of metaphors. Where culture likens brains to computers and machines to humans, Holmes asks what happens when people begin to interpret themselves through machine logic—when bodies, feelings, and relationships are reduced to data, programs, and networks. He considers experience itself to be his true medium. Each work creates a simulacrum of the systems people already inhabit, reframed as spaces for play. Through embodied engagement—seeing, listening, choosing, and moving—participants encounter these systems from a new angle, opening the possibility of reflection and transformation.

Running through Holmes’ work is the tension between alienation and desire. Each project approaches alienation differently—through social disconnection, digital distortion of the body, vulnerability in the politics of being seen, or cultural overstimulation around sexuality. Each also acknowledges desire—romantic, sexual, existential—as the force that animates these conditions. Holmes often places his own body, voice, and history inside his works, revealing how private experience collides with larger architectures of power and connection. His practice frames art as a technology of experience, opening portals to reconsider what it means to connect in a world increasingly organized by machines.