Submerged is part of an ongoing body of work titled Diffeomorphism, which began in 2021 as I trained a pre-diffusion era StyleGAN3 model on my personal archive of photos from my whole lifetime. Having overloaded the model with more diversity than it could represent, its flaws and imperfections became prominent and, through these, I felt a deeper understanding of its nature emerge.
For me, watching the film is meditative. It is non-representational yet not fully abstract either. The animation is morphing and warping, smoothly and in a manner akin to breathing.
I hacked and reworked this model, keeping the bits normally cropped out, injecting noise into its different layers, finding techniques for hand navigation. Images I’d previously discarded began to seem more beautiful and significant than those I was initially drawn towards. I found I could work these into undulating landscapes of pattern, texture and vaguely familiar forms. I found them hypnotic.
In the proto-perception that emerges, I feel I’m witnessing something analogous to the natural intelligence our universe is made of: a process of becoming, where a web of pieces are incrementally nudged until they hold a world. It drew me into a long journey contemplating what this mechanical proto-perception has to reveal about how intelligence emerges in the universe.
There have been a few outputs of this project. Presented here is an audio-visual meditation, an attempt to share something of this medium of emergent perception, flawed yet eerie, and a mirror through which we might catch a glimpse of one of the building blocks of our intelligent universe.
16m29s with an original score composed by Tim Murray Browne and featuring vocals from Adriana Minu. 60fps super-res - at full resolution it is around 13’000 pixels wide, with aspect varying between 4:1 and 3.5:1.
Part of the project Diffeomorphism.
