The Psychology of Guli Silberstein's Digital Video Art - a critical synthesis by ChatGPT 4o

Personal Background Shaping Perspective and Themes

Guli Silberstein’s upbringing and life experiences form the bedrock of his artistic vision. Born in Israel, he grew up amid ongoing conflict – witnessing wars, political strife, and “brutal injustices” in the Middle East. These early experiences imprinted on him a deep awareness of violence and its human toll. In 2001 he completed an MA in Media Studies in New York, where he also lived through the trauma of 9/11. Silberstein has noted that “there are traumas, memories, [and] criticism” from these events that have *“found their way into [his] works”*. This convergence of Israeli roots and first-hand exposure to global crisis instilled in him a drive to grapple with war, memory, and media in his art.

Relocating to London in 2010, Silberstein carried forward this perspective, continuously engaging in digital video art and research. His work from the early 2000s (dubbed The Schizophrenic State Project) directly appropriated and processed news footage of war and terror, reflecting the media-saturated violence of his youth. In one notable piece, Silberstein juxtaposed “distressing footage of [a] Palestinian man attempting to shield his son from gunfire” with banal scenes from sports and entertainment, creating “a disorientating assemblage” that resists any simple narrative. By remixing real conflict imagery with pop culture, he forces the viewer to confront the chaotic blur of modern media. This approach, influenced by early video scratch art and Guy Debord’s concept of détournement, reveals how his background in a conflict zone and his media education combine to question how we perceive war through the flickering screen. Silberstein’s personal history thus directly shapes his recurring focus on violence, injustice, and the fragile line between reality and its mediated image.

Emotional and Philosophical Themes Driving His Work

Silberstein’s art is driven by a blend of emotional urgency and philosophical inquiry. Through glitchy visuals and experimental techniques, he continually explores core ideas about memory, conflict, technology, and human perception. Key themes that emerge from his practice include:

• Inner Life: Dreams, Memories, and Subconscious – Much of Silberstein’s creative impulse springs from his internal psyche. He is “inspired by dreams, nightmares, visions, hallucinations and memories,” treating video art as a way to transform inner experiences into poetic visual form. He describes his works as “projections from my brain” – absorbing “issues that trouble me” and letting them resurface after a time in symbolic imagery. In his own words, the process can feel like “discovering emotions and traumas…buried deep inside,” with the act of creation providing a sense of relief and catharsis. In this way, Silberstein’s repeated explorations of memory (both personal and collective) are essentially psychological, as he mines his subconscious feelings about a turbulent world and gives them tangible form.

• War, Crisis, and Media Saturation – A recurring focus of Silberstein’s work is humanity’s experience of conflict and crisis, filtered through mass media. Having been shaped by real-world violence (from Middle East conflicts to the terror attack of 9/11), he feels compelled to respond to global turmoil: *“I just can’t NOT react…that’s the reason I actually make video artwork”*. His videos frequently remix news footage of war, protest, and disasters, reflecting what he calls a “world in crisis” that art must *“highlight…creating awareness”*. By collaging atrocity images with everyday scenes, he forces us to reckon with the “dizzying…flow of mass media images” that defines modern perception. The result is often jarring and emotive: for example, his piece Target: Over & Out clinically presents a fighter pilot’s bombing run across three screens, spelling out the impersonal execution of violence from afar and its *“cataclysmic denouement”*. Across such works, Silberstein examines the emotional numbness and confusion that media saturation can produce. He invites viewers to question what it means to witness war second-hand – exploring our empathy, our indifference, and the moral and psychological distances created by technology.

• Glitch Aesthetics and Fragile Perception – Silberstein is best known for his use of glitch – the deliberate distortion of digital imagery – as a creative and symbolic device. Far from being random malfunctions, these visual ruptures are purposeful revelations. “Glitch…is often seen as disruption, but I actually see the beauty of it,” Silberstein explains; it is his way to *“reveal the inner truths that are in the images”*. Influenced by theorist Hito Steyerl’s idea of the “poor image,” he uses corrupted pixels and noisy signals to expose “deeper patterns in the world around us” and to highlight *“the fragility of our reality and our perception of it”*. Critics have noted that in Silberstein’s videos the digital “image error or glitch is always representative” – a ghostly presence that evokes “the spiritual, the political, the intimate, the human” beyond the surface of the footage. In psychological terms, the glitch becomes a metaphor for cracks in our consciousness and in society: it interrupts the familiar to make hidden layers visible. By scrambling bodies and landscapes into abstract swirls of color, Silberstein forces our senses to work harder, thereby questioning how we construct meaning from broken information. This persistent glitch aesthetic underscores his worldview that reality as seen on-screen is inherently unstable – only by embracing the distortion can we grasp the truth underneath.

• AI and the Human Condition – In recent years Silberstein has turned to artificial intelligence as both a tool and a subject, probing the boundary between machine processing and human imagination. He integrates algorithms that “guess the next frame of a video” based on prior frames, allowing the computer to hallucinate continuity and create surreal new sequences. This cutting-edge technique yielded works like Somewhere We Live in Little Loops, which uses “next frame prediction” to explore how AI might simulate human memory formation. Silberstein is fascinated by AI’s creative potential – “visuals that basically have not been seen before” – and what its “‘brain’ can offer” as insight into our own cognition. At the same time, he approaches AI with a critical eye. He observes that a neural network “totally doesn’t care what is in the frame” – it will merge a girl into a field without ethical hesitation – which is “worrying” when such algorithms are given power in our lives. Thus, a philosophical tension drives his AI-based pieces: they celebrate the generative possibilities of code while questioning the *“implications of neural networks in our lives”*. Ultimately, Silberstein uses AI as a mirror for humanity – raising questions about prediction, control, and creativity. By manipulating AI outputs and combining them with his own edits, he continues his core mission of expanding perception. His “reworking [of] media footage” through both glitches and neural networks is meant to “highlight distortions…hidden in plain sight” in the digital age, helping us *“understand, inspire and expand human perception”*.

Silberstein’s emotional investment in his work is palpable across all these themes. Whether processing the horror of war or the “shock, paranoia and surrealism” of a pandemic, he approaches video art as a visceral response to lived experience. “Weirdly I am inspired by crisis situations,” he admits – crises *“bring out images and push me forward to do work”*. This sense of urgency gives his art a cathartic, sometimes obsessive quality: he will layer and manipulate footage “quite intensely…losing [him]self in it,” working “directly from the subconscious” until *“something wonderful…hits a nerve”*. The resulting videos, with their colliding images and ruptured realities, are both deeply personal and pointedly political. They reflect a worldview forged by conflict and tempered by humanism – an artist’s yearning to find meaning amid chaos. Silberstein’s glitchy collages and AI dreamscapes ultimately serve as psychological inquiries: they ask how we remember and distort our past, how we experience media and technology, and how we feel about the uncertain world around us. By channeling his background and emotions into digital form, Silberstein creates art that challenges our minds while touching our shared human core.