The Dregs are a series of digital micro-sculptures shaped by AI’s own perceptual logic. Each piece condenses motion, color, and material strain into a brief, self-contained study, revealing how the model reorganizes matter when it can no longer represent reality coherently.
These fragments are key diagnostic instruments in registering the AI’s native gestures, primarily:
material logic — when the model misreads or imagines surface texture and substance, making solids behave like liquid or cracking lines open to reveal an imagined interior
medium transposition — the model mistakes the medium of the image—faux Polaroid emulsion, compression noise, glitch artifacts—as real physical material in the scene
and frame-aware dynamics that treat the image boundary as a site of tension.
Relation to the Diptych
While Rend and Yield explore collapse and response at both environmental and psychological scales, the Dregs distill that same material logic into miniature form—offering intimate cross-sections of pressure, breakdown, and reformation.
Project Native
As part of Project Native, the Dregs extend the project’s inquiry into AI’s perceptual behavior when given no text prompting. They reveal how the model interprets unstable visual conditions, generating native gestures that expose its own internal grammar of strain, motion, and transformation. Sound design by Barbara Chira