LATENTSPACE takes the mass of training data in generative models as its subject, focusing on representations of interior spaces and artworks. Both the video and the audio content was generated with AI to create a fully synthetic experience forcing disparate elements into dialogue: digital and physical, familiar and alien, etc. The result is an artwork that is at once beautiful and uncanny, a surreal expression of computational aesthetics.
LAX is a looping flythrough of dozens of 3D captures of spaces and objects in iconic films, recordings transcribed into rough, polygonal approximations. Tracking shots (shots that move around or across their subject) can capture enough information about their structure and surface to generate a 3D model; photogrammetry software can interpret this set of two-dimensional images of an object shot from different angles into a three-dimensional model. The 3D models in the video are geometric interpretations missing huge amounts of information necessary for realistic or complete representations, and so they change dramatically depending on the angle of observation. The work takes on the constructs of memory and observation through the lens of Hollywood films and computational representation.
Realgar Wine takes its name from a traditional festival drink that includes arsenic, a dangerous element that can cause serious harm to humans. This complex symbol of self-destruction is represented visually with a sample of realgar disintegrating in a museum display case, the yellow powder staining the wall and collecting into small piles. The 3D capture of this scene is shown in a long tracking shot consisting of moving close ups traversing the scan like a landscape, artifacts of the natural world we have incorporated into culture, imbuing them with arbitrary meaning. The scan itself is an imperfect interpretation of the physical material of its subject, the resulting video an even more limited depiction. It shows the nested realities of traditional, taxonomical, and digital interpretation as its own contingent form of experience.