Vibes in Space
The weird in my work is expressed through my interest in psychogeography, specifically the psychogeography of imaginary places. This is an exploration of the psychological link between fictive worlds and the people that wander within them. How do game environments make us feel, and how does the experience of play connect to urban psychogeographical practice? How do stories engage our sense of place? How does framing shape our appreciation of narrative? How do screenshots and photography work to capture a vibe, and how can we capture that vibe through annotation?
This is an exploration of vibes in space – atmosphere and emotion encoded as echoes on locations, and how we alchemically transmute sterile places into resonant places.
Vibes in Time
We can think of ‘the uncanny’ as ‘familiarity that exists where there should be strangeness’. This might be an unsettling glimpse of human behaviour in a robot, or an obscure song with special meaning to you playing on a phone in an otherwise silent tram.
By comparison, ‘the eerie’ is ‘strangeness that exists where there should be familiarity’. The child playing with her toys before asking about experiences she never had. Or the loyal dog that snaps awake and barks at an empty corner of the room.
My main theme in this area is ‘hauntology’, particularly in relation to large language models. This is a developing theme, expect to see more here as time goes by.