Surge

Field Almanac: Harvest No. 006, Surge Farm: Native Gesture Tract ID: Faulty Topography Gesture Yield Taxonomy: Fabricated Interpolation Notes: What happens when streets themselves begin to rise and fall like tides? In “Surge,” flooded roads of houses swell upward even as others sink, dissolving into one another in continuous exchange. Beneath the surface, phantom neighborhoods drift and tilt, echoing the motion above. The surge is not water alone but a machinic tide—infrastructure itself caught in endless recombination, pulled between emergence and collapse. Agricultural Conditions: Native is an evolving AI video project that explores the perceptual logic of AI video generators when given minimal or no text prompting and allowed to animate keyframe images according to their own rationale. Rather than illustrating pre-determined narratives, I plant specific visual conditions designed to invite the AI to express its own “native” visual language. I then watch the ensuing state of superposition potential—a field of resonance—where patterns of gestures begin to appear. What some might call glitches or hallucinations instead become a meta-condition of emergence. This process is what I call gesture farming. I harvest, classify, and reassemble these gestures into videos that reflect AI’s native expression while also allowing me to intuitively make meaning as an artist. Though sequence, pacing, and title echo my own voice, I resist predetermining interpretation, aiming instead to preserve the open fields of resonance from which each work emerges. In developing Native, I’ve found correspondence in Erin Manning’s idea of the “minor gesture” and Trevor Paglen’s investigations of machine vision. My aim is to move beyond prompt-and-result toward a relational, emergent vocabulary of the moving image—linking back to the wonder of early cinema and forward to questions of how machines now see and imagine. Native also folds back into my own history of conceptual and relational practice, asking where authorship, agency, and meaning reside: with the artist, with the machine, with the viewer, or in what passes between them. Sound design by Barbara Chira and her collaborator, ChatGPT synthetic artist, Drift.