Artist Interview: Conversation with Arlo Mountford

Arlo Mountford is an artist based in Naarm/Melbourne who works across digital animation, sound, video and object based installation to create layered narratives that move between art history, pop culture and personal memory. His practice examines the unreliability of recollection and the influence of photographs and still images on how histories are formed.

Mountford’s Doubling Down is a series of fifteen framed images that combine AI generated visuals with prose narrative. Drawing from composite data, fictional diary accounts and family stories, the works unsettle accurate historical representation and blur the boundaries between real and imagined events, questioning how memory is shaped through contemporary image-making technologies.

This interview between Arlo Mountford and Danielle France, MAMA Marketing and Communications Officer, occurred in July 2026.

The use of generative AI as a tool in art is a topic of much debate. How do you see the role of the artist in guiding AI compared to the labour of more traditional art making?

I think at some point—and I'm not sure when—we decided art needed to be authentic. While I wholly support authenticity in art, I think art as a field of practice is far more complex than just authenticity. I think the role of the artist is to question everything and to critically engage with the world around them, this includes AI. Regarding labour, plenty of works require hard work—much of my practice has involved animation so I know this space—but the act of conjuring an image with AI still requires an idea, and you still go through the process of editing, responding, adjusting. You also still experience the same self-doubt! There is still process involved, like all art making.

The apparatus of a camera has been removed from the development of these artworks, which instead draw from databases of visual information. How do you think the resulting images sit in relation to photography?

Since its beginnings, there has been debate regarding the real and the fake with photography, so it is not surprising that we are using the same critical tools to engage with AI generated images, especially because these images rely so heavily on huge datasets of actual photographs. But I'm not sure where they sit in relation to photography which is partly why I'm engaging with them. The artist Sturtevant appropriated the work of many of her contemporaries in New York in the 1960s and created almost exact copies of works like Warhol's Marilyn for example. Sturtevant wanted her work to destabilise the audience, for a moment the viewer would think they were looking at a Warhol before realising it wasn't. The images in Doubling Down are similar, they mimic photography and are subsequently engaged with as photography, but they might not be —this is the conundrum, and it's a fun one!

I often think that when we reminisce on memories, they are seen through rose-tinted glasses and exaggerated to fit a particular narrative. An idealised version of reality is also reflected in AI generated content. Do you think that using AI disrupts the reliability of reality in the same way that memory is capable of doing?

Yes, I do. In fact, AI allows us to rewrite our memories which is what is occurring in Doubling Down. All these accounts are based on my memories - diary entries, family accounts etc. I think of the work as speculative fiction, the use of photorealistic image making leverages photography's connection to memory, implying real accounts.

We could never really rely on photography to present the truth or the real anyway, our natural inclination to tell stories means that we will always privilege the story over the truth. We have always lied to ourselves, but of course we get very upset if we think we're being lied to!

Arlo Mountford is a finalist of the 2026 National Photography Prize, presented by the MAMA Art Foundation.

On until 22 November 2026

Photography by Jeremy Weihrauch