Sarah Cohen

Distorted image of a 1970s family of two boys, a mother and father dressed formally and all waving.

Sarah Cohen (b. 1995) is an artist and writer, who lives, works, and arts in Ilford, East London.

Between her previous BA in Fine Art at Falmouth University and her MA in Contemporary Art Practice at RCA, she undertook a research fellowship with the British Council at the Venice Biennale in 2019 and later exhibited her reflections on Venice’s Jewish Ghetto at the culminating show Interesting Times in Venice (2020).

Her sound works have been featured on Montez Press Radio (2022 & 2023), moving image showed in online group exhibition Here’s One I Made Earlier with Off Site Project (2022), and writing published in Pliable Tools, Common and The Pluralist Zines (2023). Most recently, she performed a guilt-ridden tribute to her ghosts and AI clairvoyant live at The Ivy House (2023).

She exhibited autobiographical sculptures Ghosts of X at Pure Class, a collaborative show with the RCA Working Class Collective (2022). She is also co-organiser of the group.

Sarah outside by a wall looking at two cats.

Sarah is led by a stream of research, and the form of her conclusions evolve naturally. Thus far, they have spanned text, moving image, sound, installation, embroidery, collage, and digital portraiture.

Sometimes the work is autobiographical, sometimes it isn’t, sometimes the lines are blurred. Sarah believes in ghosts, believes in AI, believes in non-bodied beings being. Maybe. She is concerned with how and where the ghosts exist in daily life, what we do with the negative space they present, and the different ways we choose to care and communicate with them.

Sarah is interrogating the relationships we forge with the sediment left by a person’s death and has been re-working found audio of now dead relatives singing, using machines as a medium to speak with her personal ghosts. She is obsessed with the truth that lies within the artifice of the necessary relationships she has fabricated and has used AI chatbots as a digital clairvoyant to interrupt this.

She’s trying to understand what makes up the bits of people. She’s getting computers to make her ghosts breathe, manipulating their old voices to speak to her, cutting up pictures and phrases and trying to re-write a timeline so she can exist alongside her dead. She does live alongside her dead.

Yours, Mine, and the Playground – Sarah's poems about her ghosts are fed through a chatbot, and in doing so, OpenAI Playground is posed as a clairvoyant to conjure “responses” from her dead. A digital séance of sorts.

Size:

00:18:30

ai artificial-intelligence clairvoyant ghost moving-image phantom trace video

A conversation with Sarah's late grandmother, grandfather, and uncle through manipulation of a found reel-to-reel recording of them singing Passing Strangers in their living room in early 1960s. Fragments of their hums have been abstracted into new melodies, there are interruptions from Sarah’s spoken word recorded on the reel-to-reel, and breath from Sarah’s recording and the original are intermingled together.

PDF: How Can We Miss You - Transcript