DDA Interview With…ALPHACHANNELING
“Don't Delete Art Interview With…” is an ongoing conversation with artists facing censorship and suppression online, bringing their stories to life and hearing it in their own words.
This installment features ALPHACHANNELING
Alphachanneling is a renowned artist with over 1 million followers on social media. His artwork welcomes viewers to a world of the utopian erotic, offering a daily dose of sexual medicine in the form of line, color, and sensitive portrayals of magical realism, natural beauty, and human connection. Alfa was one of the very first artists to be featured in the Don't Delete Art Gallery of Art Censored online when the project began back around 2020. And he was also recently featured in Don't Delete Arts contribution to the groundbreaking New York exhibition, Don't Look Now, which was put on by Art at a Time Like This.
Read below for an edited transcript of our conversation…
Emma Shapiro: Thank you, Alphachanneling, for being here. We're really grateful to have you, and it's very exciting to get a chance to talk to you.
Alphachanneling: Yeah, thanks, Emma. Thanks for making the space for this conversation.
ES: Just a few months ago I walked into an acquaintance apartment and there was artwork of yours on the wall and it just brought my online life into my physical life in this way that just reminded me so much of the real artwork that we like are physically losing when we're not able to see it online or in person. She found you online, and hopefully people like her are able to still find you. You've faced myriad issues within this last year. How are you feeling right now? How is everything going?
Alpha Channeling: I love hearing that. It's easy for me to forget that my work is still out there or people are still seeing it. I think I can completely lose sight of the fact that there's still some amount of the work out in the world. I've been doing this for 10 years and it's completely changed. I'm not able to run the business as it was. Basically, in the past year, that side of my art practice has completely kind of been frozen to a standstill.
ES: When did you start relying on online sales, or when did they become a big part of your practice?
Lovers Tower - Censored
Alpha Channeling: Around 2016, I was able to transition to just my art completely supporting my life. It was such an exhilarating moment. It was unbelievable to me that I was actually getting to do this - It’s one of the most thrilling things ever to make that transition. And that's what makes the grief of right now so stark, that I remember how thrilled I was to have finally found myself in a situation where my art could be my sole focus. And so right now I am very confounded by how to move forward since I transitioned into this situation over a long period of time, and I don't know how to make a radical change in just an instant, especially when the opportunities are so different right now for any small business or creator artist. The whole environment has shifted.
It seems like there's a perception of a certain kind of world that we participate in that is no longer what it is, but we still refer to it as if that's the case – like social media, as if that is still something that people can participate in that is out there to engage with. It's clearly departed from any of the ideas and values that it once was. There's a dissonance because that's not named outright. We still refer to it as “social media”, but very little of it is about the network of your connections, of your audience, of who you follow. That's a big part of what I'm navigating is how to orient and find new opportunities when that's no longer, in my opinion, something we can engage with.
ES: I also see this as a rising topic, that our social media basically should no longer be called social because it is no longer founded on the concept of having a social network at all. It is just being fed by the algorithm and more and more individuals are no longer able to basically choose what they get to see or who they get to follow and you don't get to discover new people.
Alphachanneling: Yeah. I mean, it was to me such a rich, dynamic, inspiring thing that we moved into when it began. And that was incredible. And to think now that all of those people that we have an interest in, we will never encounter what they're doing, what they're sharing, because, you know, 90% of what we're seeing is what's dominating the algorithm or what the algorithm is selecting for.
It's a really intricate relationship.
There's censorship, the morality censorship or political or money related censorship – and then there's just the suppression by algorithm. How they relate is really strange because it's easy to think emotionally about censorship and freedom of speech. I think that's a really visceral thing to react to, to feel like there's just a right to be able to express yourself. And the other side of it is much more mechanical and less emotional, but it has the same effect of suppressing your voice. It's hard to know which one is more of an obstacle.
Across Space and Time - Censored
ES: Yeah, the gut punch of your artwork being taken down online or realizing that you're being shadowbanned is not to be discounted. And the effects on people when it comes to self-censorship is very serious.
I wonder, basically, now it just means that some people succeed and some people don't and people try to succeed in an environment that is increasingly hostile to them, which flattens their artwork. With Don't Delete Art, and myself, what I am concerned about is this homogenization of the kind of artwork we get to see because of this. Have you capitulated to all this? How have you treated your own artwork in this environment?
Alphachanneling: Yeah, I feel like I've been stopped in my tracks completely. I have no idea which way is forward. And I think my conclusion is that I need to move outside of the erotic work, which is a real shame for me because it's what I love to do. And yet it's not serving me to keep going down a path that's isolating me more and more and making it impossible for me to kind of survive. Have I capitulated? It's like I don't have a choice. I don't have a way to keep this going just in defiance.
So that's the crossroads I'm at. Do I double down and just do this thing even if nobody can see it and I can't sustain it or do I explore other avenues, other modes of expression that maybe can thrive in this time and it's a real contradiction. Ideally I can do both, but it really seems prohibitive to do any of this work in this climate right now.
At the crux of it is this is the more abstract idea of sexuality, intimacy, vulnerability, love – these topics that I explore in my work and how those things are not conducive to hostile environments. They don't make sense in an aggressive environment or antagonistic environment. My theme is about really celebrating feeling safe and secure in that feeling and exalting it. And so I'm in this contradiction where sharing my work, creating my work while also knowing every piece I put out there puts me at really great risk. And the risk isn't to my person, but it's to my life.
Anything can trip the moderation. In my case, it's not a consistent policy. They might have a guiding principle, but the platform is using AI moderation which evaluates each instance correctly or incorrectly depending on its own algorithm. And you have no idea what's going to trip it. And once you get further in a flagged space, the lower the tolerances for if it gets it right or wrong. Basically, what I'm saying is every move I make online now could put me in a really completely isolated situation again, cut off from my entire audience and any means to have a voice. It's antagonistic to the exact themes I'm trying to share with people.
ES: Of course, these companies need to rely on AI for content moderation at scale. It's just a question of whether there's enough human-in-the-loop to be able to make nuanced judgments about things. But if more and more artists like you are being pushed to the edge and remove their artwork from the platform because they're worried about it triggering this, it risks too much for them. It risks too much for you. It seems like we will end up with these systemic problems within these content moderation systems where they're not getting to see artwork that has a different point of view, you know? This is something that needs to be nipped in the bud here, but unfortunately, I guess it relies on artists to continue to risk their livelihoods. That can't seem like the right measure, like that can't seem like the right option.
Alphachanneling: We're talking about lamenting what it’s going to be like when there's no art or all the art is sanitized, but also what's it going to be like when anything introspective or slower or immediately this low calorie content? What about everything else that's also going to be suppressed from these platforms? So, it's hard to know which thing to focus on as worth fighting back or pushing back on.
These other platforms like Bluesky and Patreon, symbolically they're amazing, but they're also the tiniest little fruit stand on the side of a highway compared to the mega mall of the scale of Instagram. It's just so tiny, such a fraction that you could shift all your energy into one of those spaces and expect the same things in any way. It's certainly worth being part of, but they will never be comparable.
Lifting Higher - Censored
ES: Your account has been removed from Instagram multiple times. How many times has this happened to you?
Alphachanneling: It's interesting to think of the idea of being deplatformed twice this past year. You know, the first time was devastating for me. That was over 10 years of work, over like 4,000 posts, an entire history of engagement. And it's like a virtual landmark. It's a space that I can go back and see how it began and all the moments along the way. And it's like a piece of virtual history for me. and maybe for other people. And having that all erased was really crazy, and being cut off from even sharing that I was gone. I just kind of disappeared. It's like you fade out. Nobody knows what's happened. They think possibly you've just stopped posting or something. So that was really hard. And then once I got the account back, I was really trepidacious.
And then when I lost it the second time, that really started to stifle my creative spirit because it seemed like a kind of impossible quest to maintain my presence on a platform that is determined to not have me there.
It's such an abstract thing. Like the thing that you think is familiar doesn't show up one day and you don't notice it right away and you start to get used to other things in that space. I don't know the artists that have disappeared from my own social feed because I only track them because they were present. Are they still making stuff? Am I not seeing it? I would have to go investigate them and half the time you don't remember exactly what's their name or what's their handle, you know? It's a phenomenon specific to the social media space. Things can disappear—the loss of creativity is silent. Silent. And because of the nature of it, we all just assume many things other than that person was taken away from us. It's so crazy.
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Alphachanneling: I'm trying to reckon with this more philosophical principle of doing things that are in flow with the universe. You know, when to recognize that you're beating your head against a brick wall, when does it make sense to stop putting all your energy against the current and find where it's flowing? Whether that means for me recognizing that what was a joy and a generative thing has become trepidacious, anxiety producing and inhibiting. So, do I want to keep funneling my energy into a negative return or do I kind of identify where it can flow and amplify and take stock of things and reorient?
ES: Your artwork is this celebration of safe space, about enjoyment and freedom — where does that belong if what it's meant to do is just be a celebration, but it's having to face this antagonism? How does being in a hostile environment change the message of it?
Alphachanneling:
[I’m inspired by] Audre Lorde and her writing about the erotic as power and just what a profound part of ourselves that is and how easily we are separated from it.
“in touch with the erotic I become less willing to accept powerlessness or those other supplied states of which being are not native to me such as resignation, despair, self- effacement, depression, self-denial.” - Audre Lorde
That is very interesting. The censorship of sexuality of sex positivity of all of these topics feels like this cultural lobotomy, like let's surgically exclude this central piece of humanity in our media in our collective repository of humanity. I would equate it to like if somebody is in an intimate situation with a lover and they want to express themselves or be a part of themselves but they're worried about being judged um that is going to inhibit that freedom. In my case, it's not the judgment I'm worried about, but the repercussions of that sharing. And so it makes the making of the art feel conflicted because it's like honoring myself and I'm being true to my joy in making it, but while I'm making it, I'm understanding that this is working against me in my world. And this devotion of my time and my energy will be creating problems for me. And so there's a conflict in my own freedom to devote myself to it because I'm kind of making things harder by putting my energy into something that will create retribution.
For me, it's, you know, it's my livelihood that the real impact is. If I was somehow not dependent on my art, I think I might have less of an edge to the whole thing.
ES: But what a pity because being being dependent on your art, being able to be a full-time artist is what it's what you're supposed to do.
Alphachanneling: It's interesting to think of how this censorship plays out. If you use a nude body and you know that there's not a person who's going to decide “is this sexual? is it not? is it pornographic? is it a content violation?” [instead] it's a machine who's going to visually scan the image, detect what's in it, and if it sees anything that has association or resemblance to a nude figure, it will know to tag it that way, and it will get filtered. So, how could you ever include those things knowing that the tiniest inclusion of anything that trips the system will make your work invisible? Why would you want your work to be invisible? Like, if you could just not put that figure in or if you could obscure that figure just enough, then the whole world will get to see what you're making. And if you refuse to obscure it, you've maintained your integrity, but it will like never be experienced. It's such a crazy way of making art. It really is.
ES: Yes, especially that kind of self-censorship — we've developed an entire visual vocabulary of how to try to trick an algorithm away from identifying the human body just to be able to include it, whether these things work or not. And it's such an absurd game that we play.
Alphachanneling: Yeah, because risking it is more than risking. I mean, that’s how my account was taken down. And I'm navigating sexual suggestion, where it doesn't have to be nude. If it's sexually suggestive, right, it's a problem. Which means any intimacy is problematic. So now I have to consider making art that's not intimate, which could mean not ever showing two people together. So like that's kind of uh stripping that part of my workout.
ES: I'm saddened to hear that, but you're a very prolific artist, so I could only imagine that what you end up making is going to be beautiful. But I really am sad to know that in order for you to be the artist that you want to be, you have to make these concessions.
Alphachanneling: I think it comes down to somehow preserving that joy of making outside of these platforms and the structure not conflating the two experiences even though they're so tied together. That's where I'm at right now. That preservation of that space personally, regardless of how I navigate that greater space publicly.
ES: Well, I think that that's a a really good good note to leave off on for now, Thank you Alphachanneling for speaking with us.
This has been another installment of Don't Delete Arts Interview with series where we interview artists who face online challenges about their experiences and what they do to overcome them. Thank you.