Nephoscope is an up-coming digital work that meditates on the intersection of AI technologies, the infrastructural and metaphorical cloud behind them, and the more-than-human forces shaping our contemporary technical environment – which the latter reshapes and reframes in-turn.
Nephoscope is named after a series of nineteenth century instruments used for monitoring the velocity and direction of overhead clouds. Originally employing a dark circular viewing mirror with a built-in compass, the digital nephoscope developed for this project conducts visual analyses of cloud movements using a video camera tied to a simple optical flow algorithm. The derived vectors are then used to interface with a spatial model of textual word embeddings generated using material drawn from A. Lawrence Rotch’s Sounding the Ocean of Air (1900), as well as other early meteorological texts. These spatial queries then cue the generation and placement of a lexical poem, that flows across the visual scene.
More detail on the project can be found in the paper “Aeolian AI: Generative Art and Environmental Computing”, which was presented at EVA 2024. It can be viewed at this link here.
Nephoscope is an up-coming work that, it is planned, will be released in both digital and printed forms. This entry will be updated in due course.