Spectral Parallax

Machines increasingly act on our behalf. Assistive and autonomous driving systems read the road and respond faster than a driver can. Computer vision watches streets, rooms, and screens long after a person has looked away. Algorithmic systems compose images, sounds, and texts. Much of what appears as machine agency comes from differences in time. These systems register faster, hold signals longer, and keep working after human attention has moved on. Spectral Parallax takes these differences as its subject. It asks how they shape what corporeal and computational systems are each able to do.

Broadcast and networked signals, computer processes, environmental changes, and human attention all take in the world at different speeds. Each notices different things and holds on to them for a different length of time. When they share one space, what is perceived and what can happen next depend on how they affect one another. No one of them decides it alone.

The work is being developed to bring live and recorded inputs from the site and from elsewhere together with AI listening and seeing systems. These systems are designed to become attuned to the place over time. What they hold on to decides what can return later, and when. What the work receives is sent back out, and each signal sent out changes what can be picked up later. Computation is one system among others and does not control the rest.

It is planned as a series of site-specific versions. Each version is shaped by the signals, surroundings, and means of its location. Future versions may carry the same question beyond installation. It could extend into bodies that move within the systems’ timing and into objects that remain after the signals have passed.