"Algorithmic Light" is a project exploring how technologies of sensing and artificial intelligence (defined broadly to encompass many diverse systems, including machine vision) can facilitate speculative sensibilities and outlooks on a world that is forever unfolding along multiple registers of emergence, transformation, and affect. There are many stories I wish to narrate as part of this project. One such concerns whether 'AI-augmented' modes of creativity can manifest in ways that are not inevitably oppositional to Earthly ecologies - as an inherently extractive, technocentric proposition - and instead able to contribute, quietly and unobtrusively, to generative practices that are sensitive towards the highly complex, contested domain of human-technical-environmental relations.
The outcomes of this creative-critical investigation are presented here. These consist, chiefly, of an image viewer that sequences the outputs from a process in which a computer driven camera, coupled to a machine vision architecture, captured timelapse imagery of a selection of field sites within regions of the United Kingdom designated as Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The system assessed each captured image comparatively to detect and map the apparent changes between them, framing areas of ‘interest’ in coloured boxes. The data in these digital (re)mappings was then employed to manipulate a textual source, Jacquetta Hawkes’ pioneering work of geoarchaeological writing A Land (1951), ‘labelling’ each designated frame in a scene with a derived word. The collective result is a shifting lexical constellation running across each image that variously resonates or rearticulates it. Therefore, rather than the typical arrangement of machine vision identifying, filtering, and tracking persistent ‘objects’ in a changing scene, defining them with discrete labels, "Algorithmic Light" tracks varying regions of apparent transformation—as driven by sunlight, wind, movement, and algorithmic thresholds—and describes these using an ever-shifting matrix of expressive possibility.
Accompanying the timelapse imagery is a longer contextualising commentary that discusses the origins, aspirations, and critical implications of the "Algorithmic Light" project. Additionally, each field site depicted has accompanying notes describing it in more detail, as well as narrating the actual experience of its digital capture.
is a Lecturer in Digital Culture at the University of York. Carter’s academic practice investigates the more-than-human as it manifests across technical activities, objects, and environments.
