After Ophelia.

When LLM deep research tools started appearing, I used one to look myself up. Some of what came back was outdated. Some was wrong entirely. Those details had been written by others, preserved in places I could not reach or correct. The model cited them as though they were facts. I became what had been said about me.

Ophelia speaks fewer than 60 times in Hamlet, yet essays, paintings, films, criticism, online commentary, and now AI-generated analyses continue to claim they can explain who she really was. John Everett Millais' 1852 painting gave her the face many people still imagine. Academic discourse gave her symbolic weight. YouTube video essays, Reddit threads, search summaries, and pop culture keep extending the cycle.

Taylor Swift's 2025 song “The Fate of Ophelia” extends the same pattern into mass pop culture. Ophelia remains a vessel for other people's meanings, her story endlessly rewritten by whoever holds the microphone, or the algorithm.

Now, when you search for Ophelia, AI systems synthesize all of this into confident summaries, each generation of technology adding another layer between the character and whoever she might have been. After Ophelia traces how a person's image is built, stabilized, and automated by others. When everyone tells your story for you, what remains that is actually yours?

The work does not try to recover a single true Ophelia. Instead, it makes visible the accumulation of image, explanation, repetition, platform, archive, and machine. Each version becomes another layer in a system of representation, making the construction visible rather than pretending it can be cleanly undone.

Both works show how representation becomes a kind of erasure.

I followed how Ophelia has been passed from voice to voice, medium to medium, each time losing a bit more autonomy. Shakespeare's text became Millais' painting. The painting became the default mental image. That image became the basis for countless reinterpretations, academic and casual, each claiming insight into her madness, her victimhood, her symbolic function. Now AI systems scrape all of this and present it as objective knowledge.

In Ophelia, Retold, I gathered these fragments and let an AI voice speak them. The quotes come from their original sources. Some unchanged, others shifted in meaning simply by being placed beside new company, much like Ophelia herself. The 3D-rendered figure searches through space as though looking for herself inside this borrowed language.

Ophelia, Reassembled continues this through image rather than voice. I created initial 3D renders, then transformed them using AI image generation, deliberately leaving the process visible. The meshes, the digital artifacts, the moments where the illusion breaks - these are not flaws but evidence. They show that every image of Ophelia is constructed, that authenticity was never an option.

Together, the works create a loop between being seen and being retold, between image and explanation, never quite resolving into a single stable truth.

This work began with a personal experience of finding my own image misrepresented online, then discovering how quickly those misrepresentations calcify into accepted fact. Ophelia became the perfect historical parallel, a figure defined almost entirely by other people's interpretations, now endlessly recycled by algorithmic systems that treat all sources as equally valid.

The project does not propose to recover the real Ophelia. That person is irretrievable. Instead, it makes visible the mechanisms of her ongoing construction. They are the voices that claim to explain her, the images that claim to show her, the platforms that claim to know her.

In an age where AI can generate both images and explanations with equal fluency, the line between representation and fabrication has collapsed entirely. We are all, in some sense, becoming Ophelia. Written by others, then rewritten by their machines.

Ophelia, Retold incorporates sourced text from Shakespeare's Hamlet, academic writing, online commentary, and interpretive videos about Ophelia and Millais' painting.

• Shakespeare, Hamlet
• YouTube: World's Greatest Paintings S01 E09
• YouTube: Jen Chan
• YouTube: Dr Scott Masson
• Reddit r/Shakespeare (Comprehensive-Act-13)
• Elaine Showalter, “Representing Ophelia”
• Christine Riding, John Everett Millais (Tate, 2006)
• Reddit r/ArtHistory (natalielynne)

2025

SCENES: The Sensory and Constructed Image in the Digital Age, Digital Sector, Paris Photo 2025. November 13-16, 2025, with VIP preview on November 12. Organised by ArtVerse Gallery. Shown works: Ophelia, Retold and Ophelia, Reassembled.