Antichambre, 2023

Antichambre is a narrative research developed by generative artist anaglyphic. It builds on previous works such as Pyramid Scheme and Cités Nuageuses to push forward their work on etched representations of improbable spaces.

Taken in an overly literal French sense, an antichambre is the opposite of a room. In a more reasonable one, it is as smaller room that acts as a buffer between a public space and a private one. It is the limbo in which one forgets the past to sink in the anticipation of the high-stake social interactions to come.

The topographies depicted by Antichambre iterations naively represent what can be at stake with these intermediary spaces. The floating moments spent in these rooms are what some of the present is made of, as the past is gone and the future is always to come. By making a slices of time a slice of space, the Antichambre algorithm provides cognitive helper to anchor a perspective on the instant.

The narrative on which the research is based on aims at making this shift easier for younger audiences. The story follows an individual identified by a serial number. Ensuing an apparent mistake, the character obtains undue responsibilities and starts to unwittingly unravel the fabric of an already precarious community. The reader comes to understand that minor glitches appearing at the edge of a structure are as many indicators of hidden core fractures.

Antichambre hence comes with a tentative, if naive, political message. Agents living in slices of systems can rebuild the agency necessary to heal its fractures by looking for the glitches.

Antichambre is an algorithm written in ECMAScript. It does not rely on any premade code libraries. The file it outputs is a scalable vector document (XML-SVG). As such, it is size-less: it can be zoomed-in to any depth. It can also be pen-plotted by a machine. Open the console for export instructions.