Dark Life (2023)
“Dark Life” is the video portion of a speculative design project developed in the course “Who Comes After the Human?” This project conceptualizes a posthuman and post-Anthropocene life that might exist long after humanity has gone extinct.
My proposal for the next iteration of life on this planet is the extremophile, which I argue represents a “dark life;” an existence at the limits of human comprehension, a life that can only be gleaned obliquely, in shadows, through negation.
This video project utilizes datamoshing, found archival footage, and glitch soundscapes to represent the sensorial, affective, and aesthetic aspects of this speculative future.
Codex Extremophilica (2023)
What evolves because of our ruins? Codex Extremophilica is the second part of the “Dark Life” speculative design project conceptualized in the Fall of 2023. This codex serves as both an artbook and theoretical text that speculates the potential mutations and evolutions of extremophiles who thrives because of anthropogenic alterations of the planet. Utilizing Midjourney AI, this project morphs the extremophile with post-Anthropocene landscapes and asks how might dark life flourish in waste and ruin?
Song Credit: Algorithms For Pianos And My Wounded Heart by Carbon in Prose
Variation on Dark Life (Colorized, 2023)
Digital Erosions (2023)
This project explores the intangible aspects of deep time and scale by using archive footage of ecological elements like the sky, earth, and sea. The videos highlight the interplay between large-scale planetary phenomena and smaller, discrete entities through time-lapse effects and digital deconstruction. The goal is to prompt viewers to contemplate deep time and scale while emphasizing the need for attention and care towards our environment. By distorting and layering the footage, the project aims to engage the senses and make the viewer feel connected to the depicted elements.
Video Stats:
Video Length: 3:47
Video Size: 12MB
Encoding Time ~1:40
Song: The Caretaker - A Stairway To The Stars
Media are perhaps most interesting when they reveal what defies materialization. The waves and the winds bear up or destroy ships. The flame's greatest service is to convert matter into other forms or to make it vanish altogether. The sky has resisted almost all human artifice and yet has always been at the heart of human knowledge. No one has yet figured out how to store time or save the body from sickness and death, though efforts to do so constitute the history of our archival and medical techniques. The history of media is the history of the productive impossibility of capturing what exists. — John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media.
Girl Online (2023)
A browser based experiment utilizing Alex Quicho’s text “Everyone Is A Girl Online” (2023), exploring the concept of the ‘girl’ through TikTok memes and AI generated narrators.
Let Me In To Your Window (2023)
"Let Me In to Your Window" is a datamosh video project originally hosted within the browser. It reimagines Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" through the lens of glitch aesthetics, and haptic deconstruction. Within this digital realm, the uncanny feminine body disintegrates with an animated disobedience, unfolding across time and scale. Inspired by Legacy Russell’s glitch feminism, this project embraces the uncanny feminine form as it breaks down, disperses, and multiplies through an intentional hacking of data elements, rendering Kate Bush as a spectral presence within the web browser. "Let Me In to Your Window" seeks to collapse the boundaries between the physical form and the digital avatar, offering an alternative perspective where ruination and decay become generative forces, producing a new kind of body, a digital femininity.
Coded Affection (2023)
Toward a Computational Poetics
This project originated from a sense of curiosity, particularly fueled by my interactions with OpenAI's ChatGPT, which had previously resulted in numerous unsuccessful attempts at co-creation. The question that compelled me was whether a machine could craft poetry with depth and novelty. The initial response was less than inspiring.
Frustrated by the program's lack of poetic subtlety, particularly in terms of metaphor and emotional nuance, I decided to shift my approach. Rather than requesting traditional poetic forms like sonnets, villanelles, or haiku, I asked the program to communicate in its native language: fragments of scripts, algorithms, and code. The outcome presented here is the culmination of my ongoing dialogue and my endeavor to forge a collaboration between machine and human that transcends the confines of language and embodiment.
All the code featured is a product of ChatGPT's attempt to translate my poetry into programming languages, primarily using JavaScript, Python, and Ruby. Minor adjustments were made to ensure aesthetic sensibility and a coherent flow.