Digital Detritus II a, b, c, 2024/2025, analogue photograph overlaid with custom RNN trained on North Sea shipping forecasts

 

Digital Detritus III, 2025/2025, photograph of original flotsam sculpture and its AI versions

 

Digital Detritus I, 2024, 2025, AI video frames derived from single analogue photograph

 

 

THAT GREY VAULT

 

The sea here functions as a vault, concealing histories beneath shifting surfaces, much like the datasets and techno-politics that underpin generative AI. This project moves between analogue photographs, sea-worn debris, and algorithmic generations, mapping slippages from the tactile to the computational. Each work begins with fragments—detritus salvaged thenrecombined—where meaning and representation are provisional and unstable.

This digital archive contains traces of extraction, colonial expansion, and machinicrecomposition. Where is the actual versus the synthetic, and where will we be when these systems start feeding themselves? The imperialism of the past—which spread over oceans during the last Industrial Revolution—has accelerated and is generative, self-motivated, and voracious.

 

 

An excerpt from Derek Walcott’s ‘The Sea is History’:

…and in the salt chuckle of rocks
with their sea pools, there was the sound

like a rumour without any echo

of History, really beginning.