Waveform

Richard Carter

    Research output: Contribution to journalSpecial issuepeer-review

    Abstract

    The film Waveform is an output from a project of the same name that has been ongoing since 2017, and which centres on the use of drones as tools for generating poetry. Initially, a drone captures aerial images of incoming ocean waves. These images are then analysed by a machine vision system that traces the boundary between wave and shore. This boundary provides a stream of variables for another algorithm that generates short, poem-like texts, which meditate on questions of environmental sensing and sense-making.

    Waveform is presented as a speculative apparatus—a fragment of a world in which sensory technologies are employed for creative, notional ends, rather than a source of purely specular representations. The project considers how these devices might be used to re-articulate the world not as a static formation, with an embedded array of attributes awaiting detection and visualisation, but as one that is emerging and transforming continually—with sensory devices contributing also to this emergence. Here, quantitative outputs in the form of numerical graphs and charts give way to poetic texts that hint not only at the scene being imaged, but also convey aspects of the sociotechnical contexts in which these acts of sensing and interpretation occur, and which often go unacknowledged. The point of this gesture is consider how these contexts are both integral to the ways in which sensory acts are framed, and to consider how they might be reframed in-turn so as to enable new modalities of sensory unfolding and becoming. Such openness to alternative potentials for sensing and knowing will be critical in negotiating the forces of severe ecological disruption and degradation which characterise our present moment.
    Original languageEnglish
    JournalInternational Journal of Creative Media Research
    Volume5
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2 Nov 2020

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