a cloud in my room
Project Advisors:
Karel Klein (Design Studio)
Erik Ghenoiu (History & Theory)
Damjan Jovanovic (Thesis Prep)
©2023
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Table of Contents
“a cloud in my room” is a virtual scenography of chimerical
Stemming from an intimate attachment to the psychological project explores the integration of early photographic techniques the-art image-making tools of artificial intelligence.
The procedural proposal puts two moments from the history slip between the genesis and the status quo marked by transitory new territory for architecture fictions. Within this overlapping
Fiction is akin to alchemy. In François Roche’s words, “the “narration, illusion, science, and sensation”. As one version us and the world, the project alludes to a mutual poiesis
How do we shed light on that which refutes the administration reality that is in constant co-existence with our quotidian granted the opportunity to delve into an alternative, invisible
Within the nebulous space between the known and the unknown, Amidst the dramaturgy of this transient uchronic moment, wrinkled cavity, containing soft whirs and translucent drips.
Not seeing is to see the invisible. To be outside of one thing the eternality of the universe, from living and social space Riddles of the world mesmerize. Reduction and lack evoke depart from ephemera.”
chimerical reveries.
psychological influences of personal space in one’s memory, the techniques (pinhole imaging, cyanotypes) and state-of-
history of image-making in short circuit, making a time transitory telepathy. The superimposition delineates a overlapping realm technological mutations occur.
“the fiction of architecture as a kind of pataphysics” mixes version of the modification of perceptual linkages between of synthetic xeno-poetics.
administration of the sensible, residing amongst the invisible quotidian world? With “a magic and diabolic power” we are invisible reality.
unknown, the quest for blurry knowledge emerges. moment, the totality of space metamorphosizes into a volatile, drips. In the recursive time of the cosmos, in the core.
thing is to be inside of another. We cast our glance into space contaminated with histories and constellations. evoke a feeling of disquiet. In insubstantial form, “we all
Abstract images conjured by a handcrafted camera obscura, via the archaic and somewhat arcane cyanotype techniques, demonstrate a courtship with the early days of photographic processes in their fetal stage. Merely susceptible to only a range of radiations (ultraviolet) that escape the capture of human optics, the cyanotypes develop amorphous shapes in a specific hue of blue. These shapes are further interpreted by Stable Diffusion, a natural language processing (NLP) A.I. tool, with text prompts– some technical descriptions and some surrealist poetry Eventually uchronic manifestations of this invisible reality are spewed out of the black box, in time-based morphologies reminiscent of the mechanisms of A.I.-generated animations on a two-dimensional static surface. A fake depth, scenarios emerged and unveiled.
In the Eyes of the Cyanoclops
1/// A Cyanoclops conjures
To capture certain aura(s) of some specific space (here at issue is our school building), a series of optical devices are fabricated, attempting to combine in-camera cyanotypes and pinhole cameras. The logic of camera obscura remains the same, with fresnel lenses (or a tiny aperture) that serve as a pathway for projecting an inverted image.
Chemicals on cyanotype are iron compounds sensitive to a limited range of ultraviolet radiation. This feature leads to the slowness of its photographic processes, therefore long exposure time. UV radiation bounces on and off, destabilizes. Furthermore, the interior environment renders drastically different from the exterior due to this limitation. This device becomes an eye of the building, susceptible to only the ephemerally unseeable of the built environment.
Enters Cyanoclops, a Frankensteinia hybrid of cyanotypes plus Cyclops. With his one and only eye fixated on light pouring in, he becomes a medium that re-enacts a relationship between in and out.
2/// A,morphous
Cyanoclops endures temporality, condensing fleeting moments amidst this constant play of light. Ineffable clusters of UV particles accumulating in a contingent manner. Abstractions within the images produced by this premature way of seeing appear polymorphous. Yet there is a fine line between the (poly-)morphous and the a-morphous. Light blobs are not against interpretation.
Entities concealed from the naked eye require new apparatus for comprehension. Between signals and information there is latent space with potentialities for extrapolations. Apophenia with its overdetermination supplements us with capabilities for interpreting morphologies.
3/// Apertures: leap out of the void
According to the mechanisms of Cyanoclops, the origin of these light blobs can be determined, therefore accurately described with a piece of descriptive text. With this additional information, the abstractions as raw materials are re-interpreted by Stable Diffusion, one of the latest NLP models.
prompts = "still life photograph of an aperture of a room, leaking light through the window from the exterior, in the style of Claude Monet, with Prussian blue color scheme"
“Contemporary perception is machinic to large degrees.” With the aid of machinic vision, oneiric scenarios of windows as apertures are re-created. Out of the void-like imagery produced by the synthesis of currently obsolete photographic techniques, meanings and affective attachments emerge.
scattered notes
Scattered notes, like dreams without continuity, like life made of pieces.
Notes éparses, sans suite comme les rêves, comme la vie toute faite de morceaux.
Paul Gauguin, Cahier pour Aline, 1893
Light, solar to lunar
First there was light. It has been and will always be the reason why we see the world, or else there would only be darkness and void. We are aware of the centrality of optics to all of human perceptions.
In the solar universe of ours the Sun (with its subdivisions of different wavelengths) is the origin of all light, yet we never really look at it. More precisely, to look directly into the Sun would be self-destructive, the potential harm to the eyes being dramatic. Sun devours all lines of vision, with its violent, masculine power overshadowing the world. We interact with light in mediated ways. Light bounces off and on against surfaces of everything, revealing to us their corresponding shapes, colors and forms. Solar radiation scatters, reflected upon the lunar surface in a much more subtle hue, choreographed in uneven fluctuations and undulations resembling volatile feminine writing. With the lunar condition as an astronomical example, a compromising ground is found in the cracks of a dominating solar order. The world is resonating in the ambience of light. On the edges of an object, silhouettes traced by light offer auras for grasping the said object, intercepted by human perception into the secret mechanisms of vision. Constantly playing out itself in omnipresence, scenarios unfold in flux movements, defined by sporadic manifestations of certain objects into the foreground. The auto-revelation of things' appearances to the human vision is how light inscribes images, as analogies rather than representations.
Camera obscura, of chambers and enclosure
A dark chamber with a hole on one side, the camera obscura projects the exterior landscape into a well-conditioned interior environment. This mechanism is based on the principle of pinhole projection. The radiation of light is concluded as lines on technical illustrations, demonstrating areas of lumination. Traversing through the aperture in between, rays of light shape into a pair of asymmetrical cones. The image projected on the wall is inverted.
The camera obscura was a significant invention in the history of photography. It was the first device that allowed people to capture an image of a scene without having to draw it. The apparatus was also used to develop the first camera, as an attempt to shrink a piece of scenery into a comparatively controllable size. Take a look back to the etymology of photo-graphy: light-writing. Here the subject-object relationship seems to be obscured. Theorist Kaja Silverman posits photography as a kind of automatic, self-developed portraiture of the world, whereas men with their technical apparatus are only manifesting this process. A unified medium, photography born out of the simple principles of pinhole projection is elevated onto the same level as us, exhausting the possibilities of rendering the exterior world.
“Two is the smallest unit of Being.” The camera obscura case is ontologically true on the two extreme poles of the scalar axis. On the one hand, the early manifestation of a room with an aperture and the notion of “chambers” suggests its close link to the buildings as a carrier of the mechanism. Whereas on the other hand, the camera obscura model finds its counterpart in the corporeality, with the hole as aperture in parallel with the eye in a cavity. Analogically, the eye is a universal camera obscura, as an organ on the threshold of the human body that communicates between the in and the out.
Windows, or the dialectics of int. and ext.
Windows are sites of seepage and threshold of architecture. They played a significant role during the ontogenesis of the photographic technique: photos were either produced through windows, or of windows themselves. With light being the first and foremost ingredient of these productions, early pioneers worked in well-conditioned interior space. Apertures that allow for the passing of light naturally become the mediator that made these processes possible. Through this channel between the outside and the inside, views proliferate, in centrifugal directions. Windows allow for light and air to travel through the apertures, at the same time framing the landscape of the external world for the viewer. Corporeality coalesces with site conditions. Windows are not just about the outside or the inside, but about both ways, the ambiguous shape-shifting structure of subject and object. The multi-dimensionality of the interiors and exteriors is evidently present, yet highly indistinguishable.
Windows work at the existential and philosophical level. For Alberti, his treatise “On Painting” (De Pictura) relates painterly space to two techniques: an “open window” and a “veil”. These two notions co-exist in relation to windows, as ideas of apertures and frames are caught up in a whirlwind. Localities determined by proximity and distance denote the psychological intermingling of space and time. Everything is transitory.
The translucency of windows as screen plays with the dichotomy of opaqueness and transparency. Through the flatness of the surface of crystal-like glass, inexhaustible depths reveal, as the world reveals before our very eyes, once again.
In precarity and uncertainty, the individual and the cosmic merge. “We can only understand the world by starting from a place, we can’t understand it in a vague and diffuse way.” (Glissant) Windows are symbolic escape exits for our existence rooted in earth, as the vision ascends upwards in mid air.
Mutual (al)chemical development
The process of chemical photography is manifested in the images’ emerging out of the blue (metaphorically and literally). In the case of cyanotypes, with a reduced photographic performativity alien to contemporary viewers, specific iron salts are sensitive to only the ultraviolet lights. The chemical attributes give rise to an invisible reality defined by the medium’s multiple material constraints.
By placing a piece of cyanotype surface inside a camera obscura, the medium for skiagraphy (shadow-writing) returns to the field of photography. And we participate in the obscurity of the positive/negative structure of film photography. Light comes into direct contact with the photosensitivity. Ultimately overdetermined by the world, photography really becomes the world’s way of revealing itself to us. This is a process with utmost epistemological porosity.
The long process of exposure and the concurrent development of images pin this practice of photography down as becoming rather than being. In the lingering of the wait, we gradually slide into this feeling of intimacy with this piece of device at hand. Descend into the warmth of the unknown, in a telepathic bond.
Developments of a piece of chemical photography as well as its stabilization process are stimulated by a liquid agency, with water as the carriers for chemicals in an imagery tale of genesis. As the world anxiously reveals itself in abstract forms, the most prominent blueness becomes an ontological apparition. The prints are blue for the same reason as why the ocean and the sky are blue, symbolically and metaphorically.
Wetness invokes traces and imprints. Photographer Jeff Wall coined the vague term liquid intelligence in observation of an array of fluid processes evident in chemical photography. In dark nether, photography is connected to “a vast, subterranean network of primordial acts of chemical transformation”.
“Liquid” (artificial) intelligence
The wetness sustains and short-circuits, annihilating the device for making images of similitude towards an object vomiting impalpable contents. The camera obscura comes to be infested with a range of automated ghostly beings, deliberately mis-used into calibration of eerie morphologies. The dark room is now a mutant space for virtual sympoiesis. With architecture being the camera, artificial intelligence conspires as an alternative agent for photographic developments. It is digital more than chemical. The result they produce is in a ‘both and neither’ status. Gliding on an axis in between concreteness and abstraction, the images conjured are specters of the invisible world. In perturbation, ephemeral entities seamlessly morph into forms.
This image-making process resembles the surrealist practice of exquisite corpse, the only difference being we are now in close collaboration with artificial intelligence. Images are produced in a dark chamber, or in a black box. Along with nonhuman intelligences, we are in a trance state of pareidolia: attempting to perceive a specific, meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern. The physical, physiological, and psychological realms cross-pollinate with each other. Like water, like mist, the playful trans-media experiment summons a phantasmagoric nature. Artificial intelligence’s immateriality feels liquid and volatile, with a power of soft resistance. A machine comes to hijack the axioms of analog photography as a technological apparatus. New spatial thinking is realized by a shift from this technical appropriation to some kind of technical apparition.
We are enmeshed in a displaced logic of technical objects. Once prominent, some technologies prevail, yet others deteriorate and are eventually rendered obsolete. Understanding these technologies critically requires cyclical re-contextualization. An archaeological probe into the past can, at the same time, become instilled with a prophetical séance into the future.
Sympoiesis towards cosmic poetics
With the advent of natural language processing models, the anthropocentric medium for communication is facing a challenge. Prompt engineering introduces a new understanding of language, with weird codes, syntaxes and paradigms. Cheat sheets for prompt words widely disseminated on online publishing platforms become a newly formatted field guide for exerting better control over this delinquent machine intelligence.
A.I. image-making tools generate content through learning algorithms feeding on a massive pool of labels and images. The text-image pairs play a significant role in finding certain patterns in the proximity of pixels. The relationship between the abstractness of the archaic analogue photographic pictures and the figurative digital image generations is radically obscured. The procedural becoming introduces a mode of affirmation, of a collaborative ontogenesis of humans and machine intelligence that is imbued with future-directedness.
Bernard Stiegler proposed a techno-historical timeline of mnemonics,
“from individual exteriorizations of memory functions to large-scale technological systems or networks that organize memories,” with text
and image being two prominent turning points. By congregating into the perspective of manmade intelligence, a mnesic milieu that is rooted in ephemeral transmutations forges. The proposed process is oriented towards their intimate, sympathetic mutual poiesis taking place in virtuality. Artificial intelligence, a condensation of toute la mémoire du monde (all the world’s memory), becomes an agency for a poetic mythopoeia (the making of myths), understood in response to Nora Khan’s “Towards a Poetics of
Artificial Superintelligence”.
This gesture introduces an alternative way of making architectural fictions. Instead of speculating the futurity of the built environment, a layer of invisible reality conjured by the technical world camouflages the personal space. In a state of instabilities, we
come to follow and weave threads of traces, of insubstantial forms that evaporate and metamorphosize.
The room with (It
Memories are embedded milieus, entangled with In French philosopher the act of remembering epiphylogenetical, “by due to the inherent finitude as the exteriorization
mnemotechniques (as the transition from largememories.
Stiegler’s techno-historical which traces from writing a prominent theoretical Epochs from writing and television) witnessed from industries intent commercial gain.
On the other hand, with sender-receiver relation plasticity. Digital technologies industries give receivers a more emancipatory in Artificial Intelligence, associated mnesic milieu language processing image AI tools intertwines leading to a brand new distribution. This is a mystics of the memory, entanglements.
A hospital. A motel with dim lights. A Public Storage facility with rooms filled with objects, belongings, or voids. A constellation of worlds you can’t really see or know.
Emergent objects embody different scalar ontologies and dimensions. The physical, physiological, and psychological realms cross-pollinate with each other. Synergies and syzygies are enmeshed into porous compositions, or diverted into centrifugal bifurcations. Disparate scalar projects stack upon each other, disorderly, like a plate of messy but juicy lasagna. Stick a spoon in and worlds collide.
Working from the individual scale to the cosmic one is a gruesome task we willingly take on. Our perceptual apparatuses constantly re-orient ourselves, amidst spatialities ranging from the corporeal to the planetary, eventually towards something even more grandiose.
interscalar vehicles (as defined by Gabrielle Hecht): objects and modes of analysis that permit scholars and their subjects to move simultaneously through deep time and human time, through geological space and political space.
SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2018).
International Film Festival Rotterdam.
To situate ourselves within the concurrent world requires this interscalar thinking, so that we don’t get lost in delirium. But do we need to figure out how these vehicles move? What’s the structural framework that holds their mechanisms?
into the unknown, a volcanic the abyssal expanse of deep rainforests, mists of moisture over the
The ascension into the cosmos from own becomes a motion in flux and ecstasy. the past on different scales with different interweave, morphing into personal generative of new entities.
cosmotechnics (as defined the unification of the cosmos activities, whether craft-making
“It is as though something fluid had collected and we ourselves were dissolved in this We are haunted by this spectral imagery: proto-place of your individual existence bedroom. “Something unreal seeps into recollections that are on the borderline between personal history and an indefinite pre-history, place where, after us, the childhood home (Bachelard)
A retrieval of things past through reading a diary yellowed with age (Derridean). through seeing old photographs or maybe negatives (Barthesian). Up until today, nostalgia is invoked through the stumbling images captured a few years back in cloud drive.
We are enmeshed in a procedural and logic of technical objects. Once prominent, technologies prevail, yet others deteriorate rendered obsolete. Understanding these critically requires cyclical re-contextualization. archaeological probe into the past can, time, be a prophetical séance into the
cave devoid of any pre-historical murals deep sea, waves invoking thanatotic impulse verdant lushness, pluralities meandering mal·le·a·bil·i·ty
a room of one’s ecstasy. Relics of different properties cosmologies
defined by Yuk Hui): cosmos and the moral through technical craft-making or art-making.
collected our memories fluid of the past.” imagery: the infantile existence is the childhood into the reality of the between our own pre-history, in the exact home comes to life in us.”
reading entries from (Derridean). A recollection maybe even film today, a sense of digital stumbling across in the nooks of a and displaced prominent, some deteriorate and are these technologies re-contextualization. An can, at the same the future.
A set of PC. The distance between you and it. Pot plants and swarms. The room with you and your computer where you also sleep every night. (It resembles the bedroom of your childhood all of a sudden.)
Memories are embedded within the technological milieus, entangled with chronological temporalities. In French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s articulation, the act of remembering is designated to technical (or epiphylogenetical, “by means other than life”) artifacts due to the inherent finitude of human memory, perceived as the exteriorization of memory.
mnemotechniques and mnemotechnologies (as defined by Bernard Stiegler): the transition from mnemotechniques to mnemotechnologies— from individual exteriorizations of memory functions to large- scale technological systems or networks that organize memories.
Stiegler’s techno-historical timeline of mnemonics which traces from writing to digitalization serves as a prominent theoretical ground for this provocation. Epochs from writing (alphabet) to mass media (film and television) witnessed the increasing manipulation from industries intent on exploiting human desire for commercial gain.
On the other hand, with the networked Internet, this sender-receiver relation is bestowed with a clearer plasticity. Digital technologies of the information industries give receivers the capacity to produce, in a more emancipatory manner. With the latest advent in Artificial Intelligence, we might even say a more associated mnesic milieu is prospering. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques used in text-toimage AI tools intertwines writing with image generation, leading to a brand new way of image production and redistribution. This is a new opportunity to venture into the mystics of the memory, and their unretrievable spatial entanglements.
the hauntologists
alternate visual systems
cross-species worlding
early 90s CGI your childhood bedroom
sympoeisis
reality and its make-believe doppelgänger
para-fictions
