Amber Boardman

There is a curious growing trend of young people spending hours online watching lo-fi videos of high school students from the 90s. Nothing much happens in these fuzzy camcorder clips; there might be an impromptu dance performance in the hall before class or a perfunctory wave to future viewers. But mostly, these videos function as 'establishing shots', capturing the atmosphere of teens in hallways opening and closing lockers, talking, giggling, and hanging out on their lunch breaks. It's strange to me anyone might enjoy seeing young people of 30 years ago (people their parents' age or my own age) doing mundane things and find it fascinating. But for the youth of today, there is both novelty and longing in seeing people interacting with ease rather than awkwardly huddling over screens. That they long for these experiences that seemed so natural to me at the time gives me pause. While I was busy living my life, I was unwittingly living out the fantasies of future generations. I hadn't realized that everything would soon change with the arrival of pervasive internet. My work explores how we adapt to digital life. I view these paintings as linked anthropological studies, with titles that serve as micronarratives. Working in series, I construct each exhibition as an unfolding sequence of scenes, where every canvas operates like a sentence within a longer story—one that tracks how our encounters with technology nudge our behavior, resulting in profound shifts our emotional states, our relationships, our attentions and societal norms. This exhibition contains two interwoven layers of meaning. On the surface, these paintings describe the liminal season between childhood and adult life: the end of high school. Through these teenage rites of passage, joy, chaos, and vulnerability collide. In this summer before the more serious demands of adulthood, the subjects experiment with newly found freedoms: riding around in cars, attending bonfires, throwing house parties while parents are away. Several paintings depict slumber party games. These young adults test-drive budding desires with games like Spin the Bottle. Candlelit games summon strong fears and emotions as they experiment with powers they don't yet fully understand. They summon unknown oracles with Ouija boards or invoke entities through a conjuring game in a darkened bathroom chanting into the mirror 'Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary' in that delicate space between hoping and fearing that a ghost will appear. Underneath the surface reading, these paintings are a metaphor for the collective coming-of-age precipice we stand on. Just as these teenagers invoke spirits through mirrors and Ouija boards without fully grasping what they're summoning, we find ourselves prompting AI, invoking similarly slippery-to-control forces whose full implications we're only beginning to understand. With the coming of AI, perhaps humanity's childhood is over; everything is about to change in ways we cannot begin to imagine. Maybe a new phase of life is about to begin, and the consequences of our actions will be more substantial. Unlike the teenagers, we have no older, wiser ones in the background watching over us, holding out a safety net. These scenes resonate as both celebration and farewell, as if we are revelling at the end of a world we know while stepping into a future we cannot imagine, yet hope will be benevolent. Perhaps one day, future generations will look back at our current moment with the same wistful curiosity that today's young people feel watching those crude 90s camcorder videos—longing for a time when humans still interacted with each other and the world without AI as intermediary. Our own "Summer Before Everything Changed" might become another lost artifact of pre-transformation innocence, viewed through the lens of whatever civilization comes next.