P. Seth Thompson is a visual artist working in digital media, photography, and video. His work explores nostalgia, technology, and perception. Drawing from VHS aesthetics, sci fi cinema, lo fi digital artifacts, and analog distortion, he creates fragmented realities that feel both familiar and unfamiliar. Through glitches, pixelation, and layered interference, Thompson manipulates images in ways that echo memory degradation, where the past, present, and imagined begin to merge.

His interest in VHS tapes is rooted in personal experience. Growing up, video stores and late night movie marathons shaped his sense of identity. Pausing, rewinding, and fast forwarding through films became a way to examine reality, and that engagement with moving images continues to inform his practice. His work often engages sci fi tropes, surveillance culture, and cinematic mythology, reframing pop culture through a lens of digital decay.

Using digital collage, glitch manipulation, and photography, Thompson breaks down images in ways that resemble how memory shifts over time through distortion, noise, and interference. Drawing from 80s and 90s sci fi, horror, and experimental cinema, he examines how media shapes perception and constructs alternative realities within familiar spaces. His work often feels like a corrupted transmission from another timeline, where faces dissolve into static, colors bleed, and reality flickers like an unstable signal.

His recent thinking is focused on presence and absence, and the difficulty of locating meaning in spaces that once felt charged. He is interested in the idea that experiences cannot be recovered, only revisited, and that returning to a place or image often reveals a gap rather than a connection. This has led to an ongoing exploration of repetition, displacement, and the limits of memory, especially in relation to aging, loss, and the afterlife. He is drawn to how media can act as both a record and a barrier, preserving moments while also flattening them. Through this lens, his work considers how identity is constructed through fragments, and how images can function as stand ins for experiences that no longer exist in a tangible way.

If you want, I can make that last paragraph a little sharper or more conceptual, or push it more toward curatorial language depending on where you’re applying.

the last part sounds separate like I am interested ni that and in the original stuff. sounds all over the place.

You’re right, it felt tacked on. I folded the current ideas into the same throughline so it reads as one continuous practice:

P. Seth Thompson is a visual artist working in digital media, photography, and video. His work explores nostalgia, technology, and perception, with a focus on how images shape and distort our understanding of reality over time. Drawing from VHS aesthetics, sci fi cinema, lo fi digital artifacts, and analog distortion, he creates fragmented realities that feel both familiar and unfamiliar. Through glitches, pixelation, and layered interference, Thompson manipulates images in ways that echo memory degradation, where the past, present, and imagined begin to merge.

His interest in VHS tapes is rooted in personal experience. Growing up, video stores and late night movie marathons shaped his sense of identity. Pausing, rewinding, and fast forwarding through films became a way to examine reality, and that engagement with moving images continues to inform his practice. His work often engages sci fi tropes, surveillance culture, and cinematic mythology, reframing pop culture through a lens of digital decay while questioning how mediated experiences replace or stand in for lived ones.

Using digital collage, glitch manipulation, and photography, Thompson breaks down images in ways that resemble how memory shifts over time through distortion, noise, and interference. Drawing from 80s and 90s sci fi, horror, and experimental cinema, he examines how media shapes perception and constructs alternative realities within familiar spaces. This approach extends into his ongoing interest in presence and absence, especially the realization that moments cannot be recovered, only revisited in altered form. Returning to a place, image, or memory often reveals a gap between what was experienced and what remains.

His work considers how that gap is mediated through images, where documentation both preserves and flattens experience. Influenced by personal encounters with aging and loss, he explores how identity is built through fragments and how images function as proxies for experiences that no longer exist in a tangible way. The result is a visual language that reflects instability, where meaning flickers, recognition slips, and reality feels increasingly constructed rather than fixed.