specious upwellings
This series exists as part of an ongoing study concerning questions of entanglement, and how all that surrounds us interacts ceaselessly in one form or another. The initial culmination of these experiments involved multiple years of exploration and multi-disciplinary collaboration which took the form of the work decohering delineation (2022-2023), a tentative attempt at making tangible the innate interconnection of all that we tend to assume as distinct, clearly delimited forms of life, ecosystems, etc.
Normally, image-making in the context of digital, generative systems arguably defaults to the role of the subject as an initial input such as data, or observationally determined rulesets which are typical examples of this. Whilst the results are naturally striking, the role of subject risks passivity, or a degradation from existing as an equal presence when included primarily as an aesthetic raw material. Addressing this particular framing is a non-trivial endeavour, however, we wanted to explore how we might consider certain technologies as conceptually useful means to sketch out stepping stones to alternative approaches to shared image-making as artists.
To this end we desired to inject the now mundane approach of dataset → model → output wherein dataset was the total of influence from the subject in question, with an iterative interaction where the subject intervenes in the decision-making process of generation, one that would leave its decisive traces upon the final work itself. In this case, the subject of this branch of tireless aquatic fascination, namely the phenomena of oceanic upwellings.
An upwelling is a surge of cold, nutrient rich water, from the depths of the ocean. This water is crucial to nurturing a dizzying variety of oceanic biodiversity and many terrestrial denizens that depend on it for sustenance. Yet its cyclical motions are at a scale too vast and gradual for us to perceive directly. Instead we must contend with allowing the knowledge of such phenomena to enrich our only interface to it: the life we encounter in underwater excursions, imagery of which inspired and shaped the works in this series.
We decided to have each individual work be a diptych consisting of a monochrome-colour pair. While depicting the same result, they offer two very different readings of the same image. This is our attempt at trying to convey the tension we encountered in depicting something that exists at a scale far too vast for the body to experience directly in any meaningful manner.
Entangled Others
