[i am sitting on a beach]
9 July 2021
video installation, color, 4:3, silent, be, 2021, 3’16”

a contemporary twist on Alvin Lucier’s ‘I Am Sitting In a Room’. the starting point of this work is a single shot recording of sea waves during a sunny summer day. this piece of footage is used to train a pix2pix-next-frame-prediction model to forecast the future frames that should follow after the end of the recording. these predicted frames are then used to train the model again, to predict the future of this prediction. the cycle continues until we are left with a pure abstraction of the original recording: waving motion amidst a sea of pixels. the resulting film is projected onto a sculpture: a plaster cast of a laptop, which is a material “recording” of a physical object, a machine we use to transport us into cyberspace. resonating Christiane Paul’s concept of neomateriality, the work reveals the coded materiality behind its synthetically generated images, and reflects the way in which digital agents and machines (seeming autonomously) see, perceive and mould our world.


credits
camera, editing, model training, postproduction: Jeroen Cluckers
sculpture, scenography: A. De Causmaecker
video mapping, technical support: Maarten Craeynest

developed during a 2-year residency at ChampdAction, Antwerp (BE), and within the research projects AI-Driven Design (Graphic and Digital Media, department of Science and Technics) and Form a Line into a Circle (MAXlab, Royal Academy of Fine Arts), at AP University of Applied Sciences and Arts Antwerp (BE). with kind support of LUCA School of Arts / KU Leuven, Leuven (BE), docARTES, Ghent (BE) and Immersive Lab, AP University of Applied Sciences and Arts Antwerp (BE).

screenings
2021
An Audiovisual Landscape, Winter Garden, Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp (BE)

[home]