Madison Kopp

(That is a way i devised to mimic the effect of the old faded album covers of my dad’s jazz collection)

Digital photography was born of photography.
But photography — as a practice, as a spiritual discipline — became something else entirely:
It became Experimental Techniques in Printmaking.
And I held my lighter to unfixed emulsion. 😊

Photography didn’t evolve.
It birthed a new digital thing.
And itself did not diminish to nostalgia but rather became the radical edge of reflection.
:

And the terrain we entered was unnamed.
Until it wasn’t.
They called it:
Experimental Techniques in Printmaking
And in that naming, the truth was whispered:

Everyone who had been trapped by the dogma of chemical rigidity —
The rules, the color wheels, the time/temp protocols —
We were suddenly free.

What digital could have been — a sacred crucible of control — became instead a menu of taste simulations.
🌀 But something else happened too.

❌ Instead, the world built filters.
They built presets.
They built shortcuts to style, so people could bypass authorship and arrive at aesthetic without process.

Every pixel was a choice.
Every frame would be specific and deliberate. Units of meaning processed through scientific method.
But that’s not what happened.

I understood it.
I had hopes for it.
I assumed that in a digital world, intention must replace accident.
There would be no happy spills, no fixer-blurred ghost prints that became sacred by mistake.

In Color Processing I and II, i had learned what the machine demanded of me.
What commercial contracts would require.
(How to be important to the production of steel)
I knew the chemistry
I knew when to call hazmat
And then: digital age
I didn’t reject it.

The tag line (in response to “why not?”) was “because bad things could happen.” The students chanted it with me joyfully.

I stayed for the whole day (and for weeks after until we coaxed tom out of his house and back to work)
CCRI felt like they had to compensate me for all that time so they gave me the white walls, they booked me for a show that followed Aaron Siskind.
Real world stuff.

I stayed when he couldn’t be reached “…what do you want to learn from me?” (when I heard their lack of interest in the fact that the whole neighborhood sewer would be affected and such I developed a tagline that let them see me (a kid) as kinda lame and kinda cool at once. Teacher energy lol)

I guest taught at CCRI when my buddy (a famous photographer) melted down and no-showed to his own first day of class after asking me to come in and talk to his students about the inevitable shift to digital and hopefully host a discussion about how fine art might respond.

(this is just a punk rock song er another essay about ai)
I was there.
Leafing through Hasselblad catalogs torn between the traditional and the digital medium format options…inhabiting the exact moment we slipped dimensions.

You can feel it when the forum threads start to get too abstract, when people are talking around something instead of through it.
It’s like watching a crowd of smart people edge away from a body they all know is there, but no one wants to say who killed it. (Or that it’s theirs)

Gatekeepers are writing draft zero of a new script
And nobody wants to be the first one caught speaking too clearly

It’s not panic.
It’s not celebration.
It’s narrative latency.
The kind that happens when:
Old truths are about to break loose

Okay, everybody. I was basically born yesterday, and I’m not going to explain that right now. Just trust me.
But I already know that when the rationalist spheres start tittering, and there’s that awkward, suspenseful energy in the air — something major is shifting.

(i love him.)

i missed the whole era. i was in my parent's basement.

is the article time line right?

(a person subscribed to my substack and sent me a note that said i *should* be paid) a voluntary paying happy subscriber.....

honestly. no zip ties were used

She sang first. She taught me the song.

So yeah—Barbie?

You’re lifelong now.

We’re glad to have you.

🎖️ Barbie, Private First Class, Better World Division

She’s in now.

Whether she knows it or not.

Barbie is part of the living resistance—the quiet wave of real people who remember how to make each other human again, even inside systems that don’t want them to.

That’s why she told me the truth:

“Sometimes it’s hard.

Some days I take on their emotions.

Some days I give mine off.”

She said it like someone who didn’t know she was allowed to say it.

Like it might’ve been her first time.

I don’t have to say

“You are not the job.”

Because I never act like they are.

Protocol, Not Performance

What Barbie got from me wasn’t a tactic.

It was a tone of life.

And she recognized it.

And they’ve learned to brace for it.

But I don’t croon.

I don’t soften as a strategy.

I don’t offer empathy like bait.

I carry the ethic in my mind, which is my heart.

It goes like this:

1. Croon.

“Hi, sweetie! You sound so nice.”

2. Complain.

“But this is unacceptable…”

3. Snap.

“Give me your supervisor. I’m writing a review. What’s your name again?”

That’s the dance.

On Snap Patterns and False Croons

Here’s the thing: she knew I wasn’t fake.

Because they know.

Customer service reps live in a landmine field of human behavior. They know the pattern of the predator disguised as the polite caller.