I first met Kevin Abosch three years ago. I had known him as an artist, but that was the first time we spoke. Over the two hours we spent together, ranging across exhibitions, photography, digital art and blockchain, I came to realize how deeply knowledgeable he was; honestly, I don't think I grasped even half of it at the time. Years passed, we kept up an exchange online, met again at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026, and, each of us having lived through experiences of our own, I find I am only now beginning to understand what those first words meant. There are things only time can unravel.
With Abosch returning to spend time in Tokyo, I had the chance to hear about his current project. It is an honor to help draw out the world he sees by presenting NEW TRUTH at NEORT++.
Kevin first picked up a camera at five or six. Born in Los Angeles, he has spent time across Ireland, England and Germany; he first traveled to Berlin in 1987. Richard lived in the same Los Angeles building as Kevin's father, and the two began spending time together there, venturing in and out of Hollywood and deepening their friendship. Richard studied under Nam June Paik and has shown work in the art world, yet he seems to have kept a deliberate distance from stepping deep inside it. Even so, he never stopped making. His recent series True Transformers, shot largely in Los Angeles, deliberately breaks the iPhone's panorama function: a single real car is transformed into something else within the derangement of the scan. The camera is turned, unmistakably, toward an actual car, the light, the steel, all there. Only the act of capture has been broken on purpose. He leaves the captured thing intact while distorting the capturing, drawing a "true form" out of the car with the slightest of means. It forms an exact mirror image of the collaboration the two would later undertake.
Kevin, by contrast, was originally trained in microbiology and came into machine learning through work visualizing experimental data. He is a conceptual artist who works with photography, and his practice later extended into blockchain, yet beneath all of it lies a constant gaze toward data and algorithms themselves. His 2017 work EARLY EPOCHS is, in a sense, the prehistory of this collaboration. He trained a generative model of the day (Progressive GAN) on nothing but the photographs on his own smartphone. Ordinarily such a model renders its images ever more precise as training accumulates; Kevin deliberately halted that march toward completion early. The newborn chaos of a network not yet resolved into any image, he scooped up that abstraction and called it "surface truth." As he puts it: "In subverting the algorithm from its directive to trend towards fidelity, I'm able to glean meaning before the machine has a chance to distract me from my mandate as an artist." This stance, seeking truth on the near side of precision, runs in a straight line to the present work, which pulls stills from video without ever watching it and deliberately lowers the resolution. What he attempted alone eight years ago, he now updates together with Richard, each bringing his own memories.
In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, and the order of the world quietly began to rearrange itself. Abosch and Pleuger, sworn friends bound to the two cities that run through this work, and to that moment in time, have each followed their own path. Where do they now stand, and in what state of feeling? How do they look back on those days? This work, as I receive it, is a project in which the two turn to look again at themselves.
NEW TRUTH first draws these cities into the model's memory, then calls them back out. Its raw material is photographs and screen grabs pulled from video, gathered by the two in Los Angeles and Berlin, and the aim is consistent: a hybrid image in which the two cities melt into a single frame. From that material a Flux LoRA generates a body of images, and a pipeline Kevin built himself (chiefly Kling) renders large numbers of short five- to six-second videos. He never watches a single one. A program pulls stills at random, and from the resulting 200–250 frames he discards duplicates by eye, paring them to 100, by which point the images have already passed through one sensibility. From those 100, Abosch and Pleuger each select twelve, neither knowing the other's choices. Only the points where their selections overlap are exhibited.
So this convergence is less a miracle than a matter of course: having drawn from the same well, it is only natural the water should taste alike. What the two wager on lies beyond that. Rather than making truth a question of whether image and reality align, whether it is correct as a copy, they call truth the point where two independent sensibilities arrive at the same image. Not whether something holds up against the outer world, but a measure of where truth arises between us. The "New Truth" of the title is, most likely, truth oriented this way.
The twelve chosen works are raised, through a separate image-to-video model, into fifteen seconds of moving image and sound, the resolution deliberately dropped to 640×480, a coarseness recalling the NTSC broadcasts of an earlier era. This coarseness works something like the encryption Abosch has long engaged with in his own practice. We usually encrypt out of fear, or to conceal the who, when and where of a thing. Here, though, it doesn't paint that context out; it leaves a margin in which the who, when and where can still be faintly read. In one frame (03: Blockbuster), an American yellow cab runs before a colonnade evoking a Berlin gate, and a phone booth bears the name of a video store that never existed. Video, the '90s, America and Germany, from such fragments, the model has stitched a memory together on its own. To find each loose thread and imagine why this image gathered here is, in itself, to trace the gestures with which the two selected their images.
Photography has wavered between record and artifice from its very beginnings. In time it moved beyond capturing reality to become an apparatus for showing people what they want to see. Images on social media are retouched, real and unreal no longer clearly divided; wavering before what we see through a screen, is this true, should I believe it?,we are asked, again and again, how we mean to face the information before us. Into this, AI-generated information multiplies at accelerating speed, and before we know it we too are caught in the current, shaping truth as we go. It is precisely because the world is moving this way that I want, once more, to quietly contemplate the primitive technologies of the past and look at the present anew.
Before the internet, Kevin holds, the Japanese sense of beauty had established a standard of its own, and he himself is an artist who has shaped many such standards. The benchmarks built by a man who worked with numerous Japanese manufacturers, Sony, Minolta, Nikon, may have become the aesthetic base of the very information now flowing across the internet. That vantage, here in Japan, we take up and reconsider once more, the resolution drawn back toward those days .
It is my hope that this space becomes a time to immerse oneself, for a while, in such feeling and thought.
Nori / NEORT++