My new catalogue is launching soon.
The work is not really about the print. The print is the souvenir, the residue of process.
For years the archival self-portraits and performance film stills of Pasha du Valentine carried the heat of the post-punk feminist body: direct, confrontational, sometimes furious. They documented the body as manifesto—against objectification, against the infantalising gaze, against the soft violence of how women are arranged, softened, or reduced. Those images still hold that charge. They are not being “updated.” They are being fused.
iServalan Homotech 23 is the name I gave to a shift that began around 2023: the moment human mark-making, memory, and radical intent began to interpenetrate with digital layers, AI generation, and the feeling that thought itself was arriving as channels, filters, and versions. Homotech is not a costume or a marketing term. It is the felt condition of a creative centre that has already started to digitise. Hands still move. The machine has become part of the self.
The current series is the deliberate meeting of these two states. Archival Pasha material—self-portraits, film stills, the raw record of performance—is run through AI processes and then taken into Procreate for sustained hand-editing. The algorithm proposes; the hand revises, interrupts, insists. Layers accumulate, are partially erased, are redrawn. The result is not a cleaned-up version of the old work. It is a third state.
What emerges is smoother, more finessed, and in some ways more grounded. The post-punk anger has not been discarded; it has been metabolised. The new images still examine objectification, manipulation, and the infantalisation of women, but the jarring happens differently—through subtlety, through an almost ethereal polish that makes the residual radicalism more unsettling rather than less. At the same time the subject matter has expanded. Growth, life and death, war and peace, landscape and universe as experienced from inside one artist’s body and history now sit alongside the earlier feminist charge. The body is still political. It is also cosmological.
The art is the fusion. Watching the old self-image negotiate with the Homotech self, seeing which marks survive the AI, which are overwritten, which are restored by hand, is the practice. Each reel I post is a fragment of that negotiation made visible. The stills extracted from those reels and offered as signed limited-edition prints (price on application) are the material traces left behind once the process has already done its work. They are evidence, not the destination.
I am not interested in producing a new, marketable aesthetic that erases the earlier one. I am interested in what happens when an archival feminist body is allowed to pass through a later technological self and emerge changed but still recognisable—still radical, still jarring, only now with a different temperature. The public conversation I want is about that passage. The prints are there if you want to hold a piece of it.
Follow the process on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/homotech23/. Inquiries for signed limited editions are open.
Homotech self-portraiture is not a genre with a long external history. It is a personal condition and practice named in 2023 by Sarnia de la Maré (working as iServalan). The term marks the point at which human creativity and a digital self began to fuse so thoroughly that thought itself started arriving already layered, filtered, and versioned. Self-portraiture under this name is therefore the ongoing record of that fusion: the body and face as sites where the earlier radical self and the later hybrid self negotiate presence.
Pre-Homotech: the body as manifesto
Before the name existed, self-portraiture took the form of Pasha du Valentine’s performance work and its archival remains. In the 2000s underground art-burlesque and feminist scenes, the body itself was the medium—confessional, confrontational, sex-positive, and deliberately exposed. Self-portraits and film stills functioned as documents of protest, healing, and the refusal of infantalisation or soft objectification. These images carry the temperature of post-punk feminist practice: direct, often angry, humorous in its radical honesty, and concerned with shame, pleasure, and the politics of looking. They are not preparatory sketches; they are the living archive of a self staged as manifesto.
The 2023 recognition
In 2023 the artist began calling the already-occurring shift “Homotech.” The word arrived diagnostically rather than as branding. Human mark-making was fusing with a digital self that felt larger than the hand. Ideas no longer arrived only as images or sentences but as layers, channels, filters, and versions. A line could be undone; a voice could be split into characters; a dream could be held still long enough to be drawn, scored, and published as a world. The studio became a nervous system grown extra organs. iServalan names the public interface of this condition: the sonic and visual self through which sound, image, and story occupy one hybrid body. AI is neither servant nor replacement; it is one of the conditions under which certain identities can exist at all.
Homotech self-portraiture as hybrid practice
Under this name, self-portraiture moves into digital hand-drawing (Procreate, dense scribble fields, neon line, mannequin and doll-like anatomies) combined with AI-assisted layering and post-production. The resulting figures are often ethereal, futuristic, or fragmented—bodies that read as both toys and dancers, outlined and fluorescent, sitting between nightclub pattern and botanical or cosmic shadow. Works such as the digital scribble pieces, character illustrations for The Book of Immersion, and related visual series treat the self as already multiple: capable of being unmade, duplicated, filtered, or exported. The hand still performs every stroke in many of these pieces, guided by musical rhythm; the machine supplies strata the hand then interrupts or restores. The portrait is no longer a single likeness but a negotiation between versions.
This is continuous with the earlier feminist body politics rather than a break from it. The mannequin forms, the exposed or jointed figures, and the residual charge of spectacle and desire echo the archival concern with objectification and the gaze, only now the jarring arrives through precision, smoothness, and ethereal polish as much as through confrontation.
The current fusion as latest stage
The project in the making—taking archival Pasha du Valentine self-portraits and performance film stills and fusing them with iServalan Homotech 23 processes via AI and Procreate hand-editing—is the most explicit stage of this history so far. It is not an update of the old images. It is the deliberate passage of the post-punk feminist body through the later hybrid self. The radical charge (objectification, manipulation, infantalisation) remains, but is metabolised into a different temperature: smoother, more finessed, grounded, yet still jarring, while also opening onto growth, life and death, war and peace, landscape, and universe as experienced from inside that body. The reels document the negotiation in process. The signed limited-edition prints are the souvenirs left once the fusion has already occurred.
In short, Homotech self-portraiture is the history of one artist recognising that the self had already become hybrid, then building a practice that keeps the earlier radical body alive inside that hybrid condition rather than erasing it. The archive is not closed; it is the material that must pass through the machine-self in order to continue speaking.
