Statement
John Holmes is a media artist whose practice investigates how technological systems reshape and often distort 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, situating light, sound, and software as sculptural elements alongside metal, resin, and paper. Holmes treats technology as both a material and a metaphor, drawing attention to how it scripts the ways people see and relate.
Central to Holmes’ practice is the reversal of metaphors. Where culture compares brains to computers and machines to humans, his work asks what happens when people begin to interpret themselves in mechanical terms—when bodies, feelings, and relationships are reduced to data, programs, and networks. By embedding these questions into responsive systems, his installations expose the tensions between private longing and the infrastructures that mediate human connection. This inquiry is grounded in both theory and lived experience, revealing the psychic and social costs of inhabiting metaphors that collapse human complexity into machine logic.
Holmes considers experience itself to be his true medium. Each work creates a simulacrum of the systems people already inhabit, reframed as spaces for play. Play is essential to human learning. By placing participants inside environments that feel both familiar and strange, Holmes allows them to encounter the logics shaping their lives from a new angle. Through embodied engagement (seeing, listening, choosing, and moving) the participant comes to know the work experientially. This mode of encounter invites reflection that carries back into the contexts beyond the artwork, opening the possibility of paradigm shift.
Being Perceived, 2025, mockup of installation at Artville, Nashville, TN
At the core of these experiences runs the recurring tension between alienation and desire. Each project approaches alienation from a different angle: social disconnection, distorted self-image through digital mediation, relational vulnerability in the politics of being seen, cultural overstimulation around sexuality. Each also acknowledges desire romantic, sexual, existential as the energy that courses through these systems. Holmes’ works hold these forces in suspension, creating spaces where participants recognize the frictions between longing for connection and the conditions that estrange it.
Holmes often places his own body, voice, and history inside the environments he builds. This act of exposure reveals how private experience is inseparable from the broader architectures of perception and power that organize contemporary life. His practice frames art as a technology of experience, capable of disrupting the ordinary and making visible the hidden structures that shape human connection. Each project becomes a prototype for another way of seeing and being. Each encounter opens a portal into the possibility of a world organized by the desire to connect.