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). These spatial queries then cue the generation and placement of a lexical poem, that flows across the visual scene
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.