Field Almanac: Harvest No. 009, Sweep
Farm: Native Tract ID: Faulty Topography Gesture Yield Taxonomy: Optics Logic
Notes:
What does it mean to live under a sweep?
In Sweep, arcs of illumination move across wires, shadows, and debris, shifting their positions and relations. Light bends structures into false alignments, detaches figures from their ground, and unsettles space through repeated scans. What remains is a pattern of optical disturbance, a sweep that exposes but never shelters.
Agricultural Conditions:
Native is an evolving AI video project that explores the perceptual logic of image-to-video generators when given no text prompting and allowed to animate according to their own rationale. I plant specific visual conditions that invite the AI to express its “native” visual language, then watch as patterns of gesture appear—what some might call hallucinations instead become a meta-condition of emergence.
This process, which I call “gesture farming,” lets me harvest and reassemble these gestures into works that reflect AI’s own expression while preserving open fields of resonance. “Faulty Topography” (homage to photography’s New Topographics) is one thematic chapter of Native, in which AI vision misreads “unappealing” terrain, maps, and infrastructure until orientation itself slips. My aim is to move beyond prompt-and-result toward an emergent vocabulary of the moving AI image, linking back to the wonder of the early Cinema of Attractions and forward to questions of how machines now see and imagine. Sound created by the AI video models, and curated by the artist.