Echoes from the Source is an exhibition by Zen Cohen and Dana Potter that examines video environments as self-referential systems shaped by human attention, responsiveness, and intervention. Working with algorithms, collage, code, and generative processes, both artists explore how contemporary visual culture operates through cycles of repetition, mutation, and amplification. The exhibition positions video not only as a medium for spectacle, but as an unstable ecosystem in which humans and moving images continuously reshape one another through feedback, desire, and recursive transformation.

Dana Potter is an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design, Hite Institute of Art + Design, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY. Her work I’ve Decided the Internet Is Making Me Insane is a five-channel video installation composed from screen recordings of Instagram Reels. Each one-minute video layers fragments of algorithmically recommended content from a newly created burner account—cleaning videos, makeup tutorials, fidget toys, and other visually optimized media—into hypnotic kaleidoscopic collages. Through rotoscoping and mirroring, recognizable objects and gestures dissolve into overstimulating patterns of color, texture, and motion.

Zen Cohen is an Assistant Professor of Art, Clemson University, Clemson, SC. Her installation, Oracle Machine, is a totemic response to the acceleration of machine learning, the immense scale of digital images it produces, and the extractive infrastructures that sustain this proliferation. The installation creates space to reflect on the shifting role of the human collaborator within this ritual of hyperproduction—as both conduit and disturbance, poking at the signal. Through its iterative process of echoing images, Oracle Machine operates as a generative system—part divination tool, part image generator—where meaning emerges through recursion, interference, and the unstable boundary between human presence and automated production.