BECOMING
Video, 2025
About the artwork
BECOMING is a meditation on the dissolution of identity in the digital age — a study of how myth, meme, and media overtake the human reality of public figures. The work centers on JD Vance, whose political persona has been steadily subsumed by the absurd, viral versions of himself circulating online. What began as satire or exaggeration has become, for many, the only image that endures.
In BECOMING, I wanted to explore that moment when a person’s face — once tied to real words, actions, and policy — becomes eclipsed by the hyperreal echo of their meme self. It’s both tragic and comic: the vice president of the United States rendered as a caricature so omnipresent that people forget what he truly looks like. The piece asks: given enough time, which version survives? When future generations search for JD Vance, will they find the man or the myth — the record of a politician, or the eternal baby-faced meme that outlived him?
Ultimately, BECOMING is not about Vance alone, but about the way history itself is rewritten by collective humor, repetition, and the strange immortality of the internet.
Sound design by Nuclear Samurai - Audio Effects in ElevenLabs and Music created via Suno
Audio explanation
Listen to Nuclear Samurai discuss this work.
Nuclear Samurai is an artist with a background in commercial photography, and fine art photography.
He has worked for years as a studio photographer and studied a fine art degree majoring in photography. His work often considers topics such as truth in images, identity and persona in the digital era, and musings on absurdities in the way society is structured.
His visual style is often inspired by a photographic, subtle surrealism, that leans heavily on the cinematic language of film to convey narratives and emotions.