Hidden Island
Archival 3D scanned model | 12:19-16:58 GMT, 18 March, 2020
River Thames (Hammersmith Bridge), London, UK
51°29'10.2"N 0°14'53.1"W
2020
River Thames (Hammersmith Bridge), London, UK
51°29'10.2"N 0°14'53.1"W
2020
Tides are temporal and environmental phenomena caused by the combined effects of gravitational forces exerted by the Moon and the Sun, as well as the rotation of the Earth. During my observation in March 2020 along the River Thames, the time span of tidal changes was approximately 4 hours and 17 minutes. This duration is shorter than the minimum time scale within which orbiting satellites can accurately document the ever changing ebb and flow of the river, as well as the shifting bank line of the riverside.
In refining a digital geographical representation, I employed photogrammetry technology as a measuring device to document the tidal changes while walking on the tidal zone. However, the optical scanning performance of the measuring tool was disrupted by flux reflections from the flowing river surfaces. Consequently, the observational work unexpectedly revealed a hidden virtual island. This virtual geography was recognized and generated by the machine's perspective due to its glitch or blind spot in capturing the shifting boundary between the water and the land.
Our landscape may have been gradually decontextualized and morphologically transformed due to the entanglement of environmental and technological factors in the era of digitalization.
Humans and machines perceive reality based on their respective capacities. Both capacities generate individual versions of reality, each applying distinctive reading and data procession. While humans experience through sensual consciousness, computers assemble reality through algorithms, leading one to assume that reality is indeed, a subjective phenomena.
Does an outcome not match our perspective of reality, we often declare a machine-made recreation of reality as erroneous. By concentrating on these automated “malfunctions“, our environmental aesthetic is fundamentally reassessed as a result of probing into our perceptible reality. Therefore the project interrogates the boundaries between visible and invisible, tangible and intangible, ultimately what is real and what is unreal. It raises questions of humanity’s dependency on AI and wether machines have become an inevitable extension to the species.
