I have seen the noise created in the Neural Radiance Field generation process as "hallucinations". Language that is both poetic & problematic at the same time. Rather than attempting to reduce this visual phenomena, I have been working with it (and finding ways to encourage / exaggerate it) as a way of embracing and exploring this NeRF aesthetic. (An aesthetic I assume will be optimised out of the process as the technology "advances")

["The Nicholson Hermes" @ the Chau Chak Wing Museum ]

NOTES

Hallucination is currently in common usage across the machine learning space as an accepted "semi-technical" term, including in the "mission" page for Meta's ill-fated(?) "Galactica".

image: https://github.com/NVlabs/instant-ngp/blob/master/docs/nerf_dataset_tips.md

image: https://galactica.org/mission/

Trailer for the spoken word / slide performance of "What Raven Saw [an] overGround:underStory". Performed under the 48:9 screen at UTS Central (Broadway, Sydney) for the School of Design's, Visual Knowledges research group's - "Visualising the Invisible: Image making in climate communication symposium".

The visuals depict an excerpt from the performance exploring co-imagined (with a machine learning diffusion model) unremembered transitory forms of now-recognisable species.

Read to Me @ Knox Street bar, August 2nd 2022

Our in conversation at the UTS Gallery has some interesting insights into the nature of collaborative practice and how the work come to be.

Amala Groom, Andrew Burrell and Madeleine Collie in conversation from UTS Gallery & Art Collection on Vimeo.

Exhibition catalogue

Download the catalogue

can’t buy me love is extended by a publication with production images, an introduction by curator Stella Rosa McDonald, a conversation between artists Amala Groom and Andrew Burrell and an essay by Madeleine Collie.

Design by Daryl Prondoso.

Uncanny Landscapes: Tactile and Experiential Encounters with Ecological Data
Zoë Sadokierski, Monica Monin and Andrew Burrell

"Communicating complex ecological issues such as anthropogenic climate change and the effects of capitalist culture on diverse ecologies is difficult. Challenges include communicating phenomena that occur over unimaginable timescales and are often invisible to the naked eye; making these global phenomena relatable on a local and individual scale; and, instilling an understanding of the human species as enmeshed (Morton 2012) and entangled (Tsing et al. 2017) within complex ecologies, in order to foster attention and care for the world."

In: Making Data: Materializing Digital Information
Editor: Ian Gwilt
Bloomsbury Publishing, 24 Mar 2022