The National Arts Centre’s pairing of Gabriel Dharmoo’s Wanmansho with Richard Strauss’sEin Heldenleben stages a compelling conversation across time about how music constructs identity and narrative. In Wanmansho, Dharmoo transforms the orchestra into a site of ritual and mythmaking, performing as both composer and soloist through voice, breathwork, gesture, and silence. The work invents a fully imagined cultural ceremony, blending satire, myth, and expressive theatricality. It interrogates the mediation of culture itself, foregrounding how performance and media shape perception and engagement, turning the audience into active participants in a constructed reality.
Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, by contrast, deploys orchestral scale and rhetoric to monumentalize the heroic self. The NAC Orchestra captures every nuance of Strauss’s narrative, from the intimate lyricism of the companion episode to the overwhelming force of battle and triumph. Where Strauss asserts identity through epic musical spectacle, Dharmoo experiments with multiplicity, hybridity, and performative mediation. Together, these works illuminate how orchestral media can construct, challenge, and transform notions of culture, heroism, and presence, revealing music as both narrative and immersive, a space where identity is performed, mediated, and refracted across generations.
The program was made all the more memorable under the direction of conductor Alexander Shelley, whose time as Music Director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra comes to an end this season. Shelley brought clarity and energy to both works, balancing the bold theatricality of Dharmoo’s Wanmansho with the sweeping grandeur of Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. His final performances with the NAC Orchestra make this concert a powerful close to his leadership, leaving a lasting legacy of innovation and artistry.
I have been really enjoying Alien: Earth so far; the series blends suspense, striking visuals, and complex ethical dilemmas in ways that are both intriguing and thought-provoking, like the original movie and its sequels-some more than others. It situates horror at the intersection of technological, corporeal, and ecological systems. Fear arises not simply from alien lifeforms but from the networks that generate and contain them: corporate infrastructures, technological apparatuses, and ethical contingencies. The series presents alienness as simultaneously aesthetic, perceptual, and ethical; hybrid bodies, synthetic forms, and immersive environments create a field in which horror, reflection, and perception converge. Wendy, the synthetic-human protagonist, functions as both observer and observed, mediating the apprehension of systemic otherness in ways that are affective, philosophical, and ethical.
The series’ temporal structure transforms suspense into a layered and reflective experience. Horror extends beyond the story itself through multimedia storytelling, combining streaming episodes, podcasts, behind-the-scenes features, and immersive experiences; viewers navigate multiple layers of time simultaneously, moving between the immediate events on screen, anticipated developments, and knowledge of the franchise’s history. Familiarity with canonical moments from the original films intersects with the series’ present narrative, creating a suspended space in which ethical reflection and anticipation converge. Horror arises not only from the presence of alien lifeforms but from our awareness of systemic conditions: corporate ambition, technological experimentation, and ecological vulnerability. The opening sequence of the hibernation pods exemplifies this vividly; its cinematography recalls the original film and its sequels, framing enclosed bodies with high-contrast lighting and deep spatial perspective, linking Alien: Earth to its cinematic predecessors. Fear emerges as viewers recognize the continuity of containment, vulnerability, and technological mediation across decades of franchise design, transforming suspense into both ethical reflection and perceptual engagement.
Spatial and visual configurations further mediate this apprehension. Enclosures—spaceships, research stations, and terrestrial landscapes—function as immersive topologies that simultaneously protect and threaten. Within these spaces, uncanny lifeforms such as the eye-octopus and the sheep operate as emblematic vectors of aesthetic and ethical reflection. The eye-octopus, with its multiplicity of eyes, renders vision itself alien; it confronts the human spectator with the limits of embodied understanding and the redistribution of agency. The sheep, serene and unassuming, functions as a locus of ethical contemplation; it makes visible the consequences of technological intervention and foregrounds the fragility of life within systems of control. Screenshots of critical sequences, such as the opening of hibernation pods or close-ups of Wendy navigating alien environments, underscore the deliberate continuity and evolution of franchise aesthetics. These motifs operate less as spectacle than as instruments for the apprehension of relational and systemic conditions; horror is inseparable from ethical reflection and perceptual calibration.
images upon enfolded images
Hybrid corporeality is central to the series’ treatment of otherness. Wendy’s body, like the eye-octopus, unsettles hierarchies of perception and agency; she occupies a liminal zone where human, synthetic, and alien attributes interpenetrate, at once vulnerable and empowered, observer and observed. The sheep, by contrast, anchors human action in an ethical frame, its vulnerability exposing the consequences of technological mediation. Together, these figures exemplify Technological Otherness, where fear and reflection arise from relational structures rather than from isolated monsters. The sheep, like their use in Severance, stand as markers of human experimentation and technological control; whether as literal subjects of manipulation, as in cloning or laboratory testing, or as symbolic witnesses to systemic intervention, they foreground ethical responsibility and the consequences of humans exercising power over life.
Horror in Alien: Earth is inseparable from its temporal, spatial, and corporeal registers. Alien lifeforms, corporate systems, and experimental technologies intersect to produce systemic contingency, while bodies and enclosures function as both protection and exposure. Visual motifs such as the eye-octopus, the sheep, and the hibernation pods crystallize these tensions, linking continuity of aesthetic form with ethical consequence. Horror becomes the recognition of vulnerability, agency, and systemic mediation.
The series thus develops a logic of horror that is perceptual, aesthetic, and ethical. Human, alien, and synthetic forms are mutually constitutive within environments structured by relational networks. Horror is not mere shock; it is the perception of contingency and the embodied awareness of survival within technological and corporate frameworks.
This aesthetic design resonates with art-historical traditions, where spatial construction, light, and corporeal orientation mediate intellectual and ethical reflection. Hybrid figures like the eye-octopus evoke post-humanist questions of embodiment and agency, while the sheep embodies the fragility of life under systemic intervention. Horror emerges from negotiating these registers, where immersion, perception, and ethics converge.
Alien: Earth demonstrates that contemporary horror is inseparable from the conditions that produce it. Narrative, visual, and temporal design collaborate to construct systemic fear, implicating audiences within networks of surveillance, hybridity, and containment. In this sense, the series synthesizes aesthetic spectacle with ethical inquiry and philosophical meditation.
The sheep with the octopus eye embodies uncanny, ethically charged otherness.
Its achievement lies in rendering horror both perceptual and reflective. Temporal distribution, spatialized aesthetics, and hybrid corporeality create an immersive sphere where fear is experienced as systemic and ethical encounter. Figures such as the eye-octopus and the sheep, alongside the hibernation pods echoing the 1979 film and its sequels, make visible the interrelation of agency, vulnerability, and consequence. Horror becomes not only spectacle but also a medium for apprehending how otherness is constituted, observed, and experienced. It compels recognition that fear is shaped by technological infrastructures and corporate power, exposing how otherness is managed, exploited, and contained within systems of control.
I note that there are still two episodes left in this season and I, for one, look forward to this each week although I sometimes wonder why they make such secure facilities but leave man/alien sized crawl spaces available throughout the complex?
This essay reflects on François Hartog’s Chronos: The West Confronts Time and Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume to examine how contemporary experience is structured by the density and intensity of the immediate; it considers how algorithms and data operate as instruments of presentism, shaping perception, attention, and ethical judgment, while also exploring the volumetric, spatial, and political dimensions of time that persist as gaps and openings for reflection, action, and the possibility of the event. In practice, this means that even in a world dominated by algorithmic notifications, taking a moment to focus on one’s breath can disrupt the cycle of immediacy, creating space for reflection and ethical choice. This small act of resistance becomes a political statement in an age of temporal commodification
Time no longer flows linearly but weighs, stretches, and bends. François Hartog’s concept of presentism captures this phenomenon with precision: the present thickens into an all-consuming immediacy, while the past is relegated to archives and the future collapses into anticipation and calculation. The now devours perception, enfolds thought, and dictates the very possibility of cognition. Each breath, pause, or glance becomes saturated with urgency, bending attention toward the immediate and away from slow, reflective human thought.
Data and algorithms amplify this temporal pressure. Data provides the raw substrate, capturing traces of action, movement, and behaviour, while algorithms translate these traces into legible, manipulable units. Dashboards, predictive models, and streams of metrics condense the world into fragments of the now, folding them into recursive feedback loops. Algorithms, in this sense, are the teeth of a temporal monster: they bite into the raw presence of data, structuring and presenting the present as both comprehensible and overwhelming. Immediacy thickens, intensifies, and hollows out slow time, leaving human rhythms—the time of the breath—fragmented and compromised. The phenomenology of data is enacted through algorithmic mediation; it is only through algorithms that data becomes perceptible, shaping attention, memory, and perception itself.
📸 by me📸 by me
The seduction of this system is both perceptual and political. Predictive algorithms, real-time analytics, and constant monitoring promise mastery, optimization, and control. Yet their scale, complexity, and opacity render such mastery provisional. Governments, corporations, and institutions deploy these tools to regulate behaviour, anticipate risk, and shape populations. The temporal density of the present becomes a political instrument, codifying attention, compressing reflection, and normalizing immediacy. Here, density refers to the accumulation of temporal moments, the layered presence of events, while intensity captures the pressure and urgency that these moments exert on perception and cognition; algorithms manipulate both, structuring the present to maximize immediacy while hollowing out slow, reflective time. Data flows through algorithms, structuring perception while reinforcing power, embedding the devouring present into everyday experience. This is more than capitalism; it is the monetization of time itself, a system where every moment, every breath, every micro-attention is reduced to a measurable increment, stripped of meaning except as a unit to be processed and consumed. Beyond the standing reserve of things, this is a standing reserve of the present, where experience, reflection, and ethical possibility are harvested, quantified, and compressed, leaving only the illusion of control.
To inhabit this mediated present requires rhythm, attention, and awareness lest you get lost in the Heraclitean torrent of the now. Notice the cadence of notifications, alerts, and feeds—the pulse of algorithmic time pressing on thought. Feel the compression of attention into micro-increments, the folding of past traces, projected futures, and quantified nows into each gesture. Presentism is enacted in every swipe, every calculated anticipation. Yet spaces remain for reflection, ethical judgment, and bodily presence. Awareness of the structures governing perception allows one to inhabit the present without surrendering entirely, tracing micro-rhythms and perceiving folds, gaps, and intensities that slip beyond measurement, beyond data, beyond algorithms.
The body measures temporal density through breath, heartbeat, and subtle gestures—rhythms that defy calculation. A pause, a deep inhalation, or a moment of stillness expands the present and slows its intensity. Pranayama, an ancient yogic breathing practice, can be seen not just as a spiritual exercise but as a way to experience time itself—a ‘phenomenology of time’ that reveals its texture and rhythm; it transforms breath into a form of knowledge, where rhythm and pause disclose temporality as irreducible to data and uncapturable by the algorithm. In this sense it resonates with Hannah Arendt’s description of the “gap” between past and future, that interval where thinking becomes possible, and with Christine Ross’s exploration of the temporal event in contemporary art, wherein moments can rupture habitual patterns and open new possibilities for perception and action. By grounding the abstract concept of time in bodily experience, pranayama reveals how lived time—thick, slow, and attentive—resists the urgency imposed by data and algorithms. This somatic approach aligns with Arendt’s notion of the ‘gap’ between past and future, where ethical thinking becomes possible. Perceptual vigilance, ethical attention, and recognition of temporal folds become acts of resistance, ways of dwelling in a dense, intense now without being consumed by it.
On the Calculation of Volume offers a frame for this intensity. Each fragment of the present is volumetric, measurable yet interconnected, dense yet permeable. The now is a field of relational magnitudes, where every action, data trace, and algorithmic operation contributes to a totality in flux. Time’s volumetric density, akin to matter in space-time, exerts pressure on perception and ethics, accumulating yet remaining fluid.
Drawing on Sloterdijk’s philosophy of ‘spheres and foam,’ the present can be imagined as a bubble within a larger, porous network. Each bubble is a bounded yet interconnected space—individual yet inseparable from its surroundings, much like cells in a living organism. Algorithms carve into these spheres, structuring, intensifying, and documenting them, but the foam’s porosity ensures that no total mastery is possible. These spheres are inhabited spaces of reflection, political judgment, and ethical action; their relationality allows for rupture, contingency, and the emergence of events beyond calculation. In this sense, each volumetric present is both mediated and immediate, enclosed yet open, a site where density and intensity, pressure and accumulation, coexist and interact.
Breath, pause, perception—the present unfolds in thickness, intensity, and relationality. Yet within this density remain gaps, spaces of suspension, as Arendt reminds us, where attention and judgment can surface, where ethical and political choice can intervene. These gaps resist full capture by metrics, algorithms, or the teeth of the temporal monster. Christine Ross’s reflections on the possibility of the event extend this insight: even within a heavily mediated, algorithmically quantified present, occurrences can emerge that exceed calculation, rupture expectation, and open new temporal trajectories. The devouring now is not total with the space of Augmented Reality, for example; within its folds persist spaces for surprise, reflection, and action. One inhabits it not in mastery but in careful attentiveness, navigating between density and openness, intensity and gap, algorithmic imposition and the possibility of the event. Data flows through these structures, producing both pressure and opportunity.
Time presses, bites, enfolds, and in its volumetric density, in its temporality, there is room to dwell, act, and breathe. Hartog’s analysis illuminates the contemporary condition: data and algorithms codify, structure, and circulate the devouring present, giving it density, rhythm, and shape, while promising comprehension that is always provisional, only now. The political stakes are immediate; these instruments organize populations, regulate attention, shape behaviour, and mediate social norms, from predictive policing to real-time financial analytics. To dwell in this Age is to inhabit a temporal field that is both structured and wild, dense yet ephemeral, bounded yet permeable; density accumulates moments, intensity exerts pressure on perception and action. The teeth of the temporal monster bite, constrain, and create the illusion of control, yet within these imprints remain spaces to perceive, attend, act, and judge. The present is not a point to control but a dynamic, ethically charged field to inhabit. By navigating its intensity and density, we resist the illusion of total comprehension and reclaim time as a space for reflection, action, and freedom. It becomes a series of inhabited spheres, measurable, mediated, and experienced, where data and algorithms document, structure, and intensify pressure without exhausting the lived, political, or ethical possibilities of the moment.
See Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, 1961. "The gap between past and future, which is the space of thinking, is the space in which freedom can be experienced."
See Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, 2013 - English translation."With a concept of practice based on a broad anthropological foundation, we finally have the right instrument to overcome the gap, supposedly unbridgeable by methodological means, between biological and cultural phenomena of immunity–that is, between natural processes on the one hand and actions on the other." I will note his thinking is dense. It took me 2.5 years to finish his three part Magnus Opus: Spheres and I don't think I have even scratched the surface of it.
James Joyce’s Ulyssestransformed modern literature by distilling the immensity of lived experience into the span of a single day. June 16, 1904, becomes in Joyce’s hands a universe unto itself: a temporal container vast enough to hold myth, politics, history, desire, and the smallest gestures of the everyday. The novel’s radical gesture was not merely narrative compression but the demonstration that the totality of modernity, its anxieties, its fragmentations, its pleasures, could be staged within the ordinary hours of a single date. Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume undertakes a similarly ambitious project, though refracted through a contemporary sensibility that is both ecological and philosophical. In Balle’s work, November 18 is not only the date around which Tara Selter’s consciousness circles but also an emblem of how time itself can collapse, repeat, and be lived otherwise.
The significance of November 18, especially in its Danish context, underscores that this is no arbitrary choice. It suggests a historical memory and collective atmosphere imprinted onto the present. Yet in Balle’s rendering, the repetition of this day becomes less about history as event and more about the possibility of inhabiting duration differently. Where Joyce excavates the myths and archetypes lying beneath the surface of modern Dublin, Balle turns to the structures of temporality itself, showing how repetition might create not stasis but a heightened awareness of interconnection. November 18 becomes an aperture through which the density of life (ethical, social, ecological) can be perceived.
As I noted in my other article about these books, the temporal compression of November 18 finds a parallel in the sestertius of Antoninus Pius that Tara Selter contemplates. The coin, depicting Annona with the modius, grain, cornucopia, and ship’s prow, condenses the Roman system of provision into a single, graspable unit, where the measurement of grain enforces both nourishment and governance. The modius standardizes abundance, making it calculable, equitable, and socially legible. In reflecting on this coin, Tara apprehends the ethical and material stakes of measurement, just as the recurring day crystallizes human experience into a disciplined, perceptible unit of time. Measurement, whether of grain or hours, becomes an ethical practice, an engagement with responsibility and the limits inherent in sustaining life, much like the gathering, interpreting, and distributing of data and algorithms, where each unit carries moral weight, shaping outcomes with both insight and consequence.
The resonance with Walter Benjamin’s notion of history as constellations of fragments is strikingly evident in Balle’s work. Perhaps its because his work has been on my mind lately but Benjamin posits that history is not a continuous progression but a montage of moments, objects, and dates that can illuminate the totality of a system when apprehended with insight; each fragment, each artefact, carries the potential to reveal the hidden structures of power, social relation, and human intention. In Balle, both the sestertius and November 18 function precisely as such fragments. The coin, with its depiction of Annona and the modius, condenses the economic, administrative, and symbolic machinery of the Roman Empire into a single tangible unit; November 18 compresses the ethical, temporal, and ecological stakes of modern existence into a recurring day. Together, they operate as microcosms, each having its own aura, carrying within it a dense network of dependencies, obligations, and consequences, where the material, social, and natural orders intersect.
Yet Balle’s use of repetition diverges from Benjamin’s messianic impulse toward redemption. The recurrence of November 18 is not a promise of liberation or fulfilment but a careful interrogation of limits and attentiveness. The reader, following Tara Selter’s consciousness, is invited to inhabit a temporal loop that foregrounds responsibility, patience, and the ethical weight of observation. Each repetition becomes its own sphere or container: an opportunity to measure, to account, to confront scarcity and abundance alike, compelling a sustained focus that parallels the meticulous attention the Roman administration had to give to the distribution of grain. In this sense, Balle transforms Benjamin’s fragmentary flash into a disciplined experience: repetition illuminates the structures and stakes of life not by producing transcendence but by demanding care, precision, and a continuous negotiation with both the natural and social orders. The coin and the day together suggest that understanding the whole is inseparable from attention to the smallest units (whether of grain, of time, or of ethical action) and that these units carry their own weight as sites of reflection, responsibility, and moral reckoning.
In this respect, I was reminded of Byung-Chul Han’s reflections on the exhaustion produced by late-modern temporality and how this provides a counterpoint to Balle’s literary experiment. I find his work to be quite challenging but worthwhile. Han diagnoses contemporary life as dominated by relentless acceleration, the ceaseless expansion of tasks, information, and digital stimuli, and the consequent erosion of coherent narrative or ethical orientation; meaning is dispersed across a multitude of fleeting flows, leaving the individual fatigued, overstimulated, and disoriented. Balle, by contrast, deliberately inverts this condition. In On the Calculation of Volume, November 18 is not a day among many but a temporal loop, a durational container in which events repeat and attention must be sustained. The temporal compression forces a confrontation with the minutiae of existence and the limits of endurance, compelling both protagonist and reader to recover subtle distinctions, relational patterns, and ethical nuances that are ordinarily lost in the acceleration of ordinary life.
Where Han describes exhaustion as the product of constant motion and dispersal, Balle depicts a different form of fatigue: the strain of repetition, the psychological and ethical labour of inhabiting a single day over and over, attending to the consequences of each gesture, thought, and measurement. Yet this repetition is paradoxically generative rather than purely oppressive. By arresting time, Balle opens space for new modes of perception: the attentiveness to measurement, to the ethical distribution of resources, to the interplay of human action and ecological consequence becomes possible precisely because the temporal horizon is constrained. The fatigue here is not a loss of agency but a crucible for intensified awareness, a disciplined encounter with the ethical, temporal, and material stakes of ordinary life. The volume of it all. Through this temporal inversion, Balle stages a critique of modernity’s over-acceleration, showing that slowing, repeating, and attending can reveal dimensions of experience that rapidity conceals, and that the act of returning, calculating, and noticing can itself become a mode of ethical and perceptual renewal, much like meditation or the disciplined rhythm of pranayama cultivates awareness, patience, and a conscious engagement with the flow of breath and time.
The concept of vast, interconnected phenomena that defy easy comprehension resonates with Balle’s text in profound ways. These are occurrences whose scale and duration extend beyond the grasp of typical human understanding—events like climate change or global environmental shifts. In On the Calculation of Volume, November 18 serves as a miniature version of such an overwhelming phenomenon. Though it appears as a single day, its repetition gives it a temporal and ethical magnitude that challenges simple linear understanding. Each recurrence builds upon the previous one, adding layers of consequence and action, creating a sense of accumulating significance that mirrors how large-scale ecological changes unfold over time. Just as these crises stretch across generations and ecosystems, the repeated presence of November 18 compels the reader to engage with time and consequence in new, complex ways.
The hyperobject-like nature of November 18 compels Tara Selter (and, by extension, us, the readers) to inhabit temporality differently. One must attend simultaneously to the immediate, tangible realities of action and measurement and to the broader, often imperceptible consequences that unfold across the infinite loop of the day. This dual awareness mirrors the ecological imperative imposed by climate change: human agency operates within systems whose scale is difficult to grasp, yet it remains consequential. Tara’s recognition that she can “overuse” objects, whether by drinking too much coffee at her usual café until supplies run low or finding something missing from the grocery shelf, further emphasizes how small, individual actions reverberate through larger systems. In these moments, she becomes acutely aware of the fragility and limitations inherent in the cycles of consumption, a reflection of the broader, often invisible systems that govern availability and scarcity.
Balle dramatizes this tension in literary form, using repetition to make perceptible the otherwise invisible structures of responsibility, scarcity, and ethical consequence. In doing so, the novel cultivates a sensibility or an affect attuned to both temporal and ecological depth, encouraging readers to recognize that living responsibly entails not only action but careful, sustained attention to the interplay between the measurable and the immeasurable. In this light, Balle’s work offers a subtle critique of the prevailing data-driven narrative, suggesting that while the rise of algorithms and metrics promises clarity, it often oversimplifies the complexities of human experience. The novel’s focus on repetition and attention to the limits of measurement reminds us that not everything can be quantified, and that some truths, especially those that lie in the realms of ethics, ecology, and human relationships, elude the grasp of data.
Taken together, the coin, the day, and the novel itself function as material arguments about how humans orient themselves in worlds of overwhelming density. Joyce taught us that one day could be all days, that the everyday was vast enough to hold mythic significance. Balle takes up this challenge for our contemporary condition, showing how repetition, stasis, and recursion can equally serve as apertures onto the totality of our lives. November 18 becomes a new “Bloomsday,” not for Dublin but for the precarious world we now inhabit: a world where administration, ethics, ecology, and philosophy converge upon the smallest units of experience, compelling us to ask not only how to live through time but how to live in time differently.
This is a meditation on the shifting agency of algorithms—once confined to calculation, they have emerged as active forces in the generation of knowledge. It reflects on how this transformation unsettles conventional ideas of authorship, intention, and understanding, inviting us to reconsider the delicate interplay between human thought and machine influence in shaping our reality. A continuation of my earlier post Abstracted Intelligence: AI, Intellectual Labour, and Berkeley’s Legacy in Public Policy. A reading list is below.
The algorithm has quietly evolved from a tool of calculation into a generative force shaping the very terrain of knowledge. No longer confined to precise computation alone, it now participates actively in structuring how we understand, interpret, and create. As Wendy Chun demonstrates, these systems do more than process inputs—they habituate us, embedding themselves deeply into our cognitive and social rhythms. This evolution signals a fundamental reconfiguration of knowledge itself: no longer solely the product of human cognition or systematic observation, knowledge emerges through recursive, machine-driven processes that entwine human and computational agency.
At the heart of the algorithm lies a set of rules designed to produce outcomes, but its function has expanded far beyond problem-solving. Luciana Parisi’s insight into algorithmic speculation captures how these processes generate novelty and reshape aesthetic and epistemic landscapes rather than simply calculate or represent. Algorithms now inhabit artistic, cultural, and social realms where they do not merely answer questions but frame the very logic through which questions arise. As Alexander Galloway emphasizes, the algorithm operates at the level of interface—a mediator where legibility is constructed and constrained, and where meaning becomes both possible and limited. This shift subtly relocates authority: from human hands to encoded processes, from fixed categories to contingent and often opaque patterns.
The consequences of this shift are profound. Tarleton Gillespie’s work reveals the infrastructural labour behind these systems, which govern visibility and legitimacy in ways frequently invisible to those governed by them. Algorithms do not simply replace human decisions; they reconfigure the conditions of decision-making itself, often beneath the surface. Their generative capacity introduces complexity and opacity, producing outcomes that exceed the understanding of their creators. These recursive patterns complicate verification and accountability, exposing a form of epistemic vulnerability that challenges traditional frameworks for knowledge and governance.
Expanding this perspective, Benjamin Bratton situates algorithms within a planetary computational architecture that transcends local or institutional boundaries, reconfiguring sovereignty, cognition, and identity at a global scale. This shift implicates knowledge production in a vast technical stack that governs infrastructures of power and information flow across geographies and societies. Kate Crawford grounds these theoretical insights in material realities, illustrating how AI and algorithmic systems are embedded in extractive economies, labor conditions, and environmental costs. What may appear as immaterial knowledge production is inseparable from physical and political infrastructures that shape and constrain the possibilities of computation.
Viewed through this lens, algorithmic processes resemble dynamic narratives unfolding through layers of input, context, and recombination. Like storytellers without fixed authorship, these systems orchestrate data flows and conditional operations to produce forms that exceed their components. The outputs are not passive reflections but active interventions that reorient our relationship with knowledge—from stable transmission toward real-time interpretation and negotiation. This dynamism signals both power and precariousness, demanding ongoing reassessment of assumptions and a willingness to confront the shifting locus of interpretive authority.
The visual arts offer a vivid example of this transformation. Generative algorithms produce imagery that moves beyond imitation to invention, collaborating with human creators while introducing unpredictability and chance. This interplay opens new aesthetic spaces but carries risks: the flattening of complexity, amplification of bias, and erosion of clear boundaries between authorship, intention, and effect. The algorithm becomes a co-creator and gatekeeper, shaping the field of possibility even as it expands it.
This transformation reflects a deeper epistemological turn. Knowledge no longer appears as fixed or discrete but emerges within dynamic, recursive systems that resist containment or full comprehension. Algorithms function as agents in the production of meaning, their agency demanding reflection on not only what they enable but also what they obscure or distort. In both artistic and intellectual practice, the tension between human intention and algorithmic variation generates new possibilities while compelling vigilance. When opacity deepens and systemic influences become normalized, the risks extend beyond creativity into the realm of knowledge itself.
This challenge recalls earlier philosophical critiques of abstraction and the limits of knowledge that I have talked about before. The eighteenth-century philosopher George Berkeley, for instance, challenged the legitimacy of abstract mathematical entities—infinitesimals—that lacked direct empirical manifestation. Such critiques resonate today as we grapple with algorithmic processes that often operate as “ghostly inferences,” producing outcomes whose internal workings and assumptions remain intangible or obscured. Like Berkeley’s warning against unmoored abstractions, this calls us to critically examine the epistemic foundations and consequences of the algorithmic turn. See my post on Berkeley for more here.
Emerging from this shift is a new epistemic condition: knowledge as emergent, relational, and mediated through evolving systems. In this environment, we become not only interpreters but stewards—charged with critical engagement and ethical responsibility for the infrastructures of meaning that shape our world. This requires embracing process over product, contingency over fixity, and acknowledging the redistribution of agency from cognition to computation, from conscious intent to iterative dynamics. The challenge moving forward is to interrogate not only what these systems make possible but to ask persistently under what assumptions, for whose benefit, and at what cost.
Machine art from an exhibition a few years back.
A short reading list from sources that I have read over the last few years on this topic.
Taken together, these six works form a conceptual constellation that reframes the algorithm not as a neutral instrument, but as an active participant in the production of knowledge, culture, and power. Wendy Chun foregrounds how algorithms habituate us, not just through interface but through repetition and memory, revealing the affective and social dimensions of computation. Luciana Parisi pushes further, showing that algorithms speculate—they generate rather than merely calculate—thus altering aesthetic and epistemic landscapes. Galloway’s analysis of the interface illuminates the algorithm as a mediator of meaning, a site where legibility is constructed and constrained. Tarleton Gillespie turns to the infrastructural labour behind algorithmic systems, exposing how platforms subtly police visibility and legitimacy under the guise of neutrality. Benjamin Bratton scales this transformation globally, mapping a planetary computational architecture that reconfigures sovereignty and cognition alike. And Kate Crawford grounds these abstractions in the material and political, revealing how AI and algorithmic systems are inseparable from extractive practices, labour exploitation, and environmental cost. As a group, these texts chart a shift in thought: from seeing algorithms as tools of control to understanding them as environments—generative, recursive, and contested—within which control, creativity, and understanding are continuously renegotiated.
Explores how algorithms and digital media habituate us to certain ways of knowing and acting. Chun shows how algorithmic processes become embedded in cultural habits, altering not just behavior but epistemology itself.
A foundational philosophical text that interrogates the generative and aesthetic capacities of algorithms. Parisi argues that algorithms do not just calculate but speculate—producing new forms and knowledges that exceed prediction.
Offers a media-theoretical framework for understanding how interfaces, including algorithms, shape the legibility and structure of information. Galloway positions computation as a material force that mediates meaning.
Focuses on how algorithmic systems shape public discourse and knowledge indirectly through moderation and platform design. Useful for understanding algorithmic authority and its hidden, infrastructural power.
Presents a large-scale conceptual architecture of how planetary-scale computation reconfigures politics, knowledge, and space. Bratton positions algorithms as part of a new epistemological and ontological regime.
A critical book-length study that reframes AI as an extractive and epistemic infrastructure. It explores how algorithms shape knowledge, authority, and power through material, political, and environmental systems—especially illuminating for understanding the unseen costs and global asymmetries of machine-driven processes.
The first reading of Canada’s Bill C-2 signals a significant expansion of digital surveillance and data collection powers within immigration enforcement, including enhanced capabilities for electronic monitoring, biometric data use, and information sharing across agencies. These provisions illustrate how the state increasingly relies on computational systems to govern migration, embedding control within data infrastructures that produce visibility and legibility on its own terms. This legislative shift exemplifies the broader Data Turn—where algorithmic models and surveillance reshape who is recognized or excluded. Examining this through the lens of contemporary visual art reveals how artists expose and resist these mechanisms of control, offering critical counter-narratives that emphasize opacity, ambiguity, and the contested politics of representation in immigration regimes. This article stems from my reading of Canada’s Bill C-2 informed by Joy Rohde’s Armed with Expertise (that I just finished reading), connecting contemporary data-driven governance in immigration to its historical roots in Cold War expertise, and exploring how these dynamics shape the politics of visibility and liminality.
The Data Turn has reordered not just how states govern, but how they see. In systems of immigration control, policing, and security, governance now operates through data—through predictive models, biometric templates, and behavioral scores. These systems do not represent reality; they construct it, enacting a vision of the world in which subjects are rendered as variables and futures as risks. This logic, increasingly dominant across global institutions, marks a shift from rule by law to rule by model. And as it reconfigures power, it also reconfigures aesthetics.
This shift towards data-driven governance deeply affects how migratory subjects are categorized and controlled, often reducing complex human experiences to discrete data points subject to algorithmic prediction and intervention. The imposition of predictive models and biometric surveillance transforms migrants from individuals with agency into risks to be managed, their identities flattened into probabilistic profiles. This reordering not only reshapes bureaucratic practice but also redefines the conditions of visibility and invisibility, inclusion and exclusion. Those caught in liminal states—between legality and illegality, presence and absence—are particularly vulnerable to these regimes of measurement and control, which perpetuate uncertainty and precarity.
Visual artists have responded to this transformation not only by thematizing data regimes, but by dismantling the very mechanisms that render them invisible. They expose the apparatus behind the interface—the wires, scripts, ideologies—and stage counter-visions that assert opacity, indeterminacy, and refusal. In doing so, they challenge the way the Data Turn governs the liminal, especially those living in the suspended space of migration, statelessness, and bureaucratic indeterminacy.
This artistic intervention reframes vision itself—not as a neutral or purely descriptive act, but as a tool of power embedded within technological and bureaucratic systems. By peeling back layers of digital mediation, these artists reveal how contemporary surveillance and data infrastructures actively produce knowledge and enforce hierarchies. Their work highlights that visibility is not simply about being seen, but about how one is seen, categorized, and ultimately governed—a dynamic that is especially acute for those inhabiting the ambiguous spaces of migration and statelessness.
Artists like Trevor Paglen and Hito Steyerl foreground this shift from image to instrument. In their work, surveillance footage, facial recognition outputs, and satellite tracking systems are not just visual materials—they are operational weapons. Paglen’s images of classified military sites or undersea data cables reveal the landscape of surveillance that underpins contemporary geopolitics. Steyerl, in pieces like How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, explores how machine vision abstracts, targets, and governs. In both cases, the act of seeing is no longer passive; it is a condition of being classified and controlled. The migrant, in such systems, is no longer a presence to be engaged but a deviation to be filtered—a datapoint, a heat signature, a probability.
Paglen and Steyerl’s work exposes the mechanisms through which visibility becomes a tool of control, transforming subjects into data points within vast systems of surveillance. Yet this logic of enforced legibility provokes a critical response: a turn toward opacity as a form of resistance. Where the state insists on clarity and categorization, artists embrace ambiguity and fragmentation, challenging the totalizing gaze and creating spaces where identity and presence refuse easy definition. This dialectic between exposure and concealment reflects the lived realities of migrants caught within regimes that demand transparency but offer exclusion.
If the state’s data infrastructures demand visibility and legibility, many artists respond with strategic opacity. Édouard Glissant’s philosophy of opacity—his insistence on the right not to be reduced—resonates powerfully here. In the works of Wangechi Mutu and Walid Raad, opacity takes material form: fragmentation, distortion, layering, and pseudofactuality unsettle any stable claim to truth or identity. These aesthetic strategies echo the experience of navigating migration regimes—systems that demand transparency from those who are systematically excluded from its protections. Opacity becomes a refusal of capture. It asserts a right to complexity in the face of an infrastructure that reduces lives to binary certainties.
I am guided here by the words of WG Sebald and the art of Gerhardt Richter and their use of things like dust and blur as integral to understanding of history and memory, in addition to the use of light and shadows in works of art immemorial and its relation to knowledge.
Building on this embrace of opacity, other artists turn their attention to archives—the sites where power not only records but also erases and shapes memory. By interrogating immigration documents, military footage, and bureaucratic data, these artists reveal how archives carry forward histories of violence and exclusion. Their work challenges the illusion of “raw” data, exposing it instead as deeply entangled with structures of power that continue to marginalize and render migrants invisible or precarious. In doing so, they create counter-archives that reclaim erased voices and insist on recognition beyond official narratives, mirroring the ongoing struggles of those living in legal and social liminality.
Other artists interrogate the archive: not just what is remembered, but how, by whom, and with what effects. The work of Forensic Architecture, Susan Schuppli, and Maria Thereza Alves reveals the afterlife of data—how immigration records, censuses, or military footage embed structural violence into bureaucratic memory. Their work testifies to how data is never “raw”: it is collected through regimes of power, and it carries that violence forward. These artists reanimate what official systems erase, constructing counter-archives that expose the silences, absences, and structural forgettings built into systems of documentation. This resonates deeply with the immigrant condition, in which legal presence is provisional and recognition is always deferred.
As archival artists uncover the hidden violences embedded in bureaucratic memory, another group of practitioners turns to the physical and infrastructural dimensions of data governance. By making visible the often-invisible hardware and networks that sustain digital control, these artists reveal how power operates not only through data but through material systems—servers, cables, and code—that shape everyday life. This exposure challenges the myth of a seamless digital realm, reminding us that governance is grounded in tangible, contested spaces where decisions about inclusion and exclusion are enacted.
Where the logic of governance is increasingly immaterial—hidden in code, servers, and proprietary systems—some artists work to make the infrastructure visible. James Bridle, in exploring what he terms the “New Aesthetic,” captures the eerie, semi-visible zone where machine perception intersects with urban life and planetary surveillance. Ingrid Burrington’s maps and guides to internet infrastructure render tangible the cables, server farms, and chokepoints that quietly govern digital existence. These works push back against the naturalization of the digital by showing it as a system of decisions, exclusions, and material constraints.
The “Data Turn” can be understood as a continuation of intellectual movements that critically examine the production and mediation of knowledge, much like the “Literary Turn” of the late twentieth century. The Literary Turn foregrounded language and narrative as active forces shaping historical meaning and subjectivity, challenging claims to objective or transparent truth. Similarly, the Data Turn interrogates the rise of data and computational systems as new epistemic tools that do not merely represent social realities but construct and govern them. This shift compels historians to reconsider the archives, sources, and methodologies that underpin their work, recognizing that data is embedded within power relations and ideological frameworks. Both turns reveal the contingency of knowledge and demand critical attention to the infrastructures through which it is produced and deployed.
By revealing the physical infrastructure behind digital governance, artists highlight how power operates through material systems that govern access and control. This focus on the tangible complements artistic engagements with the symbolic and bureaucratic forms that mediate migration. Together, these practices expose how both infrastructure and imagery function as aesthetic regimes—tools that shape and enforce legal and political inclusion, while also offering sites for creative rupture and alternative narratives.
Even the forms that mediate migration—passport photos, visa documents, biometric scans—are aesthetic regimes. They precede legal recognition; they shape it. Artists like Bouchra Khalili, in works like The Mapping Journey Project, appropriate these documentary forms not to affirm their authority, but to rupture them. Her work stages alternative cartographies of movement—ones based not on state control, but on narrative, memory, and resistance. In such works, the migrant is not a risk profile, but a storyteller.
By transforming state documentation into acts of storytelling and resistance, artists reclaim the migrant’s agency from reductive systems of classification. This reimagining challenges the prevailing logic of legibility, opening space for more nuanced understandings of identity and belonging beyond the constraints of bureaucratic control.
Across these practices, art offers not just critique but proposition. It creates space for reimagining how we understand legibility, personhood, and the infrastructures that shape both. In contrast to the Data Turn’s promise of seamless optimization, these works embrace what is incomplete, contradictory, and opaque. They remind us that data is not destiny, and that what cannot be captured might still be what matters most.
Together, these artistic interventions reveal that data regimes are not neutral frameworks but deeply embedded with values and power. By embracing ambiguity and incompleteness, they challenge dominant narratives of control and certainty, opening new possibilities for understanding identity and presence beyond bureaucratic constraints.
For scholars working at the intersection of immigration, data, and liminality, this aesthetic terrain is not peripheral—it is central. Art shows us that the Data Turn is not merely technical; it is philosophical. It carries assumptions about what kinds of life count, what futures are permissible, and how uncertainty should be managed. Visual practices, especially those rooted in the experience of liminality, offer a different grammar of visibility—one attuned not to classification, but to ambiguity; not to risk, but to relation.
photo of me, by me, from an art exhibition of the surveillance state in Montrealthis was from a room that tracked me taking photos of it taking photos of me
After seeing the Donmar Warehouse’s Macbeth starring David Tennant and Cush Jumbo, alongside Andor (see my other post here), a friend suggested I revisit Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood from 1957—a prompt that opened a corridor between seemingly distant worlds.
Across cultures and centuries, Macbeth has proven uniquely adaptable—not because its language is universal, but because its psychological architecture and ritual mechanics resonate beyond context. The play’s core is less about words than about the patterns of human ambition, the cyclical nature of power, and the haunting consequences of guilt. These elemental forces find expression through highly specific cultural forms, yet somehow the underlying emotional and metaphysical structures transcend linguistic and geographic boundaries. When we look at Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood alongside the Donmar Warehouse’s modern staging, what emerges is not merely a contrast in style or medium, but a deep structural affinity. Both works articulate a shared grammar of ambition, guilt, and spectral dread, communicating a universal human crisis through distinct sensory and ritualistic vocabularies.
In Throne of Blood, the influence of traditional Japanese theatre, particularly Noh, shapes the film’s aesthetic and emotional tenor. The soft rustle of Lady Asaji’s kimono, for instance, is not incidental but a deliberate sonic signifier steeped in cultural meaning. In Japanese performance, such sounds evoke the ghostly restraint and suppressed violence characteristic of spirits and doomed aristocracy. This subtle auditory presence externalizes internal psychological turmoil in a way that is deeply evocative yet restrained—an elegiac whisper of fate’s inexorability. Likewise, the persistent motif of crows circling or calling in the background serves as an ominous refrain, a natural chorus underscoring the inevitability of doom. The bird’s symbolic weight crosses cultural boundaries, appearing in both Kurosawa’s and the Donmar production as a harbinger of death and the uncanny.
Conversely, the Donmar Warehouse’s staging, while embedded in contemporary theatrical forms, draws on an equally potent ritual language of its own. The palpable tension, the fractured psychological states, and the ever-present sense of paranoia and surveillance resonate with modern anxieties but also echo timeless human fears. The crows’ calls punctuate the space, anchoring the narrative’s supernatural and fatalistic elements, while the intense physicality and raw vocal performances evoke a different kind of ritual — one rooted in Western dramatic tradition but suffused with a contemporary edge. This juxtaposition reveals how cultural codes operate not to isolate but to illuminate shared affective experiences. Both versions of Macbeth externalize inner collapse and moral disintegration through a rich interplay of sound, movement, and symbolic imagery, adapted to their cultural and historical contexts.
The fascination lies not in erasing these differences, but in tracing how seemingly distinct traditions converge in affective resonance. Shakespearean eschatology, with its linear progression toward an apocalyptic reckoning, contrasts with the cyclical time of East Asian fatalism, yet both frame ambition and guilt within inevitable cosmic orders. Similarly, courtly restraint as embodied by Lady Asaji’s measured silence finds an uneasy counterpart in the martial paranoia of the Donmar’s Macbeth, who is equally trapped by invisible forces and internal demons. These are not mere thematic overlaps but expressions of ontologies that shape how power, fate, and the self are understood and performed. The works do not speak to each other through direct translation but through the vibration of shared human experience refracted through culturally specific prisms.
In this light, Throne of Blood and the Donmar Macbeth are less adaptations of a text and more dialogues between worldviews, each exposing how ritual and narrative craft produce meaning. They remind us that theatre and film are not simply vehicles for storytelling but complex systems of sensory and symbolic mediation where time, space, and identity intersect. The rustling kimono, the haunting caw of crows, the measured silences, and the bursts of violent expression function as nodes in a network of affect, drawing spectators into a shared psychic landscape of dread and desire. By exploring these shared shadows—between samurai and Scottish kings, between East Asian fatalism and Western eschatology—we glimpse the universality of Macbeth’s tragic vision while appreciating the particularities that make each iteration compelling and distinct.
I just finished watching David Tennant and Cush Jumbo’s Macbeth and the experience lingered long after the final scene. There’s something about the way Shakespeare captures ambition’s darkness, the pull of fate, and the heavy weight of guilt that feels timeless. This production is one of the best that I have seen and I watched it from the comfort of my living room. I have also been watching Andor and suddenly, Cassian Andor’s story in Andorand Rogue One came into sharper focus—not as a simple space rebel, but as a tragic figure shaped by forces beyond his control, haunted by his own choices, and bound to a destiny that feels both cruel and inevitable.
Like Macbeth, Cassian is caught between his will and something larger—something mysterious and powerful. In Macbeth, it’s the witches. Their prophecy cuts through the air, twisting the future and planting seeds of ambition and doubt. They are strange, otherworldly figures—symbols of chaos, fate, and the unknown. In the Star Wars galaxy, that mysterious force takes shape as the Force itself, an invisible current that both guides and traps the characters who try to grasp it. It’s the spiritual undercurrent to Cassian’s rebellion, the unseen power that moves through everything and everyone.
Cassian isn’t driven by ambition like Macbeth—he doesn’t thirst for power or crowns. Instead, his fire burns for justice, freedom, survival. But the price he pays feels just as steep. Watching him, you feel the weight he carries: the betrayals, the violence, the endless paranoia. Like Macbeth’s hallucinations—ghosts and bloodied hands—Cassian’s scars are quieter but no less real. They live in his haunted eyes and his weary silence. Both men are trapped in a cruel dance with their consciences, a struggle that shakes them to their core.
Cassian sits in the shuttle, silent, his face carved in shadow. Jyn speaks beside him, unaware. He stares ahead, burdened—not just by his orders, but by the years that led him here. After Andor, the moment is heavy with history: this is a man unraveling quietly, long before the mission begins.
And yet, here the stories split. Macbeth’s path is a downward spiral—corruption, tyranny, death. Cassian’s is a slow-burning tragedy that ends in a sacrificial blaze. But beneath that sacrifice lies a quieter, deeper pain: the tragedy of a man caught between who he is, who others expect him to be, and who he fears he can never fully become. His death in Rogue One isn’t just an end; it’s a beginning. The bitter loss becomes the spark that lights a rebellion, a defiant hope born from sacrifice. Where Macbeth’s tragedy warns of ambition’s ruin, Cassian’s story whispers that even in loss, even in the failure to fully embody the heroic ideal imposed on him, there is power and meaning.
There’s also something communal in Cassian’s fate. He’s not alone—his sacrifice belongs to the many who fight alongside him, the countless unknown rebels who risk everything. And yet, in this collective struggle, Cassian’s personal fracture remains: the quiet anguish of feeling unable to be the perfect hero, the ideal symbol, or the saviour everyone demands. It’s a chorus of voices, a shared grief and courage that makes his story more than personal—yet his story is also the story of fractured identity, of the lonely burden carried behind the mask of rebellion. It is the collective heartbeat of resistance, shaped by the silent cracks in its most reluctant hero.
In the end, Cassian Andor stands as a tragic hero for our times—haunted and conflicted, caught in the relentless currents of unseen forces that shape his fate and fracture his identity. He wrestles endlessly between what the world demands of him and the limits of what he can give. The weight of sacrifice presses down not just on his actions but on who he is—or who he feels he is failing to be. Like Macbeth, Cassian’s story plunges into the shadows that live within us all: the fears, doubts, and moral ambiguities that make heroism feel at once noble and unbearably heavy. Yet where Macbeth’s descent ends in ruin and silence, Cassian’s darkness carries within it a fragile, flickering hope. His tragedy is not just about loss but about the quiet resilience of that spark—an ember that refuses to die even when the night seems endless. It reminds us that even in the deepest shadows of doubt and sacrifice, there is still light, still meaning, still a reason to keep fighting.
But what sets Cassian apart from the tragic heroes of the past—Macbeth, Oedipus, Hamlet—is the modern complexity of his identity and the fractured nature of his heroism. Classical tragedy often hinges on a fatal flaw—ambition, pride, hubris—that leads to a solitary downfall. Cassian’s tragedy, however, is rooted in a more nuanced tension: between the self he knows and the impossible ideals others impose on him; between the limits of his own being and the vast collective cause he must serve. He is not undone by hubris but burdened by the crushing weight of expectation and the sense that he can never fully embody the hero he is meant to be.
Unlike the solitary tragic figures of old, Cassian’s story emerges from within the murk of a collective struggle—where the self dissolves into the cause, where one life is both vital and disposable. His sacrifice is not singular but shared, echoing the quiet heroism of countless others lost to the margins of history. And yet, this solidarity does not spare him from isolation. If anything, it deepens it. He moves through the rebellion as a man hollowed by experience, forced to wear conviction like armour, even as uncertainty corrodes him from within. After Andor, we see that his courage isn’t blind—it’s bruised. That’s what makes it tragic. That’s what makes it real.
Moreover, Cassian’s tragedy is entwined with mystical and systemic forces—the Force, the Empire, the rebellion itself—which are not mere backdrops but active players shaping his destiny. His struggle is both personal and political, reflecting the modern anxieties of agency and meaning in a world dominated by overwhelming systems beyond individual control. In this way, Cassian Andor is a tragic hero for our fragmented, uncertain age—haunted by fate, fractured by identity, and defined by the delicate balance between resistance and sacrifice.
There was a time when images were evidence. A medieval map was not just a representation but a claim to knowledge, an argument about how the world was structured. A Renaissance painting revealed divine order, a photograph proved that something was. Today, we face a new kind of image—one that does not record but generates, one whose authority does not come from witnessing reality but from statistical inference. AI-generated imagery does not document the world; it thinks the world.
For centuries, knowledge was structured around categories. Aristotle, Linnaeus, and later the Encyclopédistes built systems to organize the world, classifying nature, history, and human thought into legible hierarchies. Even with the rise of empirical science, knowledge remained something accumulated, structured, and verified through observation.
mid journey image #prompt = [coffee in St. Peter’s Square –ar1:1]
The algorithm, however, does not organize knowledge in this way. It does not categorize the world from above but learns patterns from within. Unlike an 18th-century taxonomist, an AI system does not define a tiger by its stripes or its feline characteristics—it simply processes vast quantities of data, detecting statistical correlations that allow it to recognize a tiger without ever defining it.
This is a profound shift. Knowledge, once built through observation and classification, is now generated by inference. The AI-generated image follows this logic. It does not capture a moment, as a photograph once did, nor does it interpret a subject, as a painting might. Instead, it predicts what an image should look like, based on probabilities. The result is something fundamentally different from representation: an image that emerges from a machine’s internal logic rather than from reality itself.
For centuries, images were linked to material constraints: pigments on a canvas, light on film, a chemical process that left behind a physical trace. Even digital images, while infinitely replicable, still maintained a relationship to a source—a photograph taken, a frame captured. AI-generated imagery untethers itself from this history. It is not a copy but an invention, synthesized from a dataset of other images, none of which serve as the original.
This is not just a technological change; it is an epistemological one. If we once sought truth in the documentary image, where do we look now? If an AI can generate a face that has never existed, what happens to our belief in the evidentiary power of the portrait? And if an algorithm can create art indistinguishable from human creativity, what happens to the very idea of authorship?
We might think of AI as a historian of its own kind—one that does not preserve the past but extracts patterns from it. The great archives of human culture—museums, libraries, film reels—once functioned as repositories of collective memory. AI, trained on these vast datasets, does not remember but predicts. It does not curate the past; it recombines it.
The implications of this shift extend beyond aesthetics. In medicine, AI does not diagnose based on fixed categories but on pattern recognition, seeing correlations that escape human detection. In law, AI systems sift through precedent not to enforce continuity but to optimize decisions. Across disciplines, knowledge is becoming less about interpretation and more about computation.
Yet there is something unsettling in this. AI-generated imagery reminds us that knowledge, long thought to be something we built, structured, and controlled, may now be something we train—a vast statistical model that does not explain but predicts, does not reason but generates.
midJourney image #prompt = [grid of a single leaf –ar 1:1]
If the image was once a window onto the world, AI has made it a hall of mirrors, endlessly reflecting a logic we do not fully understand. The question is no longer whether these images are real, but rather: whose reality do they belong to?
The paradox of concrete as both the symbol of modernity and its antithesis—destruction—has been beautifully and vividly re-examined in the 2024 documentary by Viktor Kossakovsky, Architecton. The film opens with the ravaged remains of concrete structures in Ukraine, setting the stage for an exploration not only of architecture’s relationship to materiality but of its role in the broader narrative of progress and decay. Through this lens, Kazimir Malevich’s geometrically pure forms gain new resonance, shifting from abstract utopian ideals to poignant metaphors for the tension between stability and fragility inherent in all human endeavours.
The ruins of Baalbek, stark against the infrared sky, their massive columns diminished yet unwavering. Their presence in the landscape is both imposing and ghostly, a relic of human ambition that now exists in a state of suspension, neither fully intact nor wholly lost. In the documentary’s meditation on concrete and stone, Baalbek serves as a distant counterpoint—where modern concrete is cast and shaped to fit the needs of the present, these ancient stones, quarried and placed millennia ago, endure as both triumph and ruin, a reminder that all architecture, no matter how permanent it seems, is ultimately subject to time.
One striking quotation from the documentary reads: “After water, concrete is the most widely used substance on Earth.” This simple statement highlights concrete’s ubiquity and significance in shaping the modern world. Water—life’s most fundamental element—has long been the basis of human survival and connection with nature, while concrete, as the second most used material, represents humankind’s drive to dominate and define its surroundings. Yet, despite its ubiquity, concrete’s eventual decay exposes a different truth: the same forces that humans attempt to master—through architecture, engineering, and design—are ultimately beyond control. Concrete, while seemingly permanent, is just as vulnerable as the stone it mimics, subject to the ravages of time, war, and nature.
In one particularly striking image, a solitary man with a wheelbarrow is dwarfed by a massive block of stone, carved millennia ago and abandoned. This visual echoes the evocative imagery of Michelangelo’s Prisoner statues, housed in Florence’s Accademia Gallery. These figures, half-formed, trapped in their stone prison, seem to struggle towards liberation, embodying both the act of creation and the stasis of unfulfilled potential. The abandoned stone, much like these unfinished figures, occupies a space between being and non-being, between intention and entropy. The stone seems to call out for a form that has not yet been realized, just as the massive concrete structures in the documentary gesture toward what could have been—monuments of progress now succumbed to time and violence. In this way, both the material and its artistic potential exist in a state of suspended animation, caught between the historical force of its creation and the inevitable dissolution of all things.
Integral to this exploration is the use of infrared imagery, a technological choice that disrupts our traditional understanding of built structures. Infrared, often used to reveal hidden heat signatures, transforms concrete buildings into spectral forms. What was once solid, monumental, and permanent is reduced to an ethereal presence, a visual manifestation of the invisible energies and decay beneath the surface. It’s as though the material itself is attempting to communicate its vulnerability—an image of architecture that exposes itself not as a static entity, but as a system of energies, histories, and eventual dissolution.
A crucial scene in the film—an extended sequence of a massive rockslide—underscores the inherent power of stone, nature’s counterpoint to human architecture. As colossal boulders cascade down the mountainside, the camera lingers on the massive, unyielding force of the stone. This raw, natural destruction stands in stark contrast to the calculated, human-made beauty of classical architecture. The imagery here is a reminder that stone, while emblematic of permanence, is also vulnerable to the overwhelming forces of nature. This stark juxtaposition of classical ruins, once thought to be eternal, returning to the earth, punctuates the fragility of human ambition and the fleeting nature of monumental achievement.
The pairing of concrete and rock, two materials that symbolize permanence, with such violence and collapse speaks to their liminal nature. Both substances, when used for habitation or as symbols, straddle the boundary between human-made constructs and the natural world. They strain the traditional distinctions between subject and object, man and nature—two concepts that architecture has long worked to contain and define. Concrete, as both a building material and a symbol of modernity, offers the illusion of control over nature. Yet, it is precisely this illusion that makes it so susceptible to forces beyond our grasp. Rock, though an ancient and seemingly immutable material, can also become a harbinger of destruction when untethered from human will. These materials blur the boundaries of the architectural discourse, pointing to an inherent instability between humanity’s ambitions and the larger natural forces at play.
Concrete, though seemingly durable, is as much a material of transience as it is of permanence. The structures it creates can endure for centuries, but the very process of their construction—through human labour, environmental forces, and the inevitable decay—ensures their eventual dissolution. In this, concrete is emblematic of the human condition: the striving for permanence caught in the endless flux of change and decay.
Through this lens, the interaction between concrete and rock becomes a reflection of the tension between human intention and natural forces. These materials are not mere objects to be shaped or controlled but are agents in their own right, influencing the spaces they inhabit. When viewed through infrared, they reveal themselves not as passive backdrops but as active participants in the construction of meaning. Concrete’s malleability and rock’s permanence, when combined, create a tension that straddles the boundary between subject and object, a dialectic that architecture itself has long sought to transcend. If technologies shape our understanding of reality, then the use of infrared here forces us to confront the complex interplay between human creation and the natural world.
Malevich’s Architecton, in this context, becomes more than a study of abstract form. It serves as a blueprint for reconsidering the purpose and meaning of architecture in a time when the very materials that define our spaces are constantly in flux. If the built environment is constantly being reshaped by forces both seen and unseen, then architecture is not a static monument but an ongoing negotiation between humanity and the materials that constitute it. And in the suspended forms of stone and concrete, we find a reminder that art, too, lies at the intersection of creation and destruction—a space where form is constantly being struggled into existence, only to eventually fade back into the material world.
