Below The Haze Line: An Extinct Gaze, AI International Biennale, Palac Potockich, Krakow, PL

‘Below the Haze Line: An Extinct Gaze’ is an installation that reimagines our relationship with the cosmos by exploring the tension between human imagination and machine cognition. The project speculates on a future where humanity has lost the ability to directly observe the night sky, a starkly imminent reality exacerbated by environmental issues like light pollution and atmospheric haze. This erosion leaves us to rely upon raw archival data, ancient myths, and artificial intelligence to serve as our only telescope.

The sinusoidal textures originate from sonifications of scientific data from the stars within the zodiac. Here, an AI is tasked with interpreting these frequencies to retrieve a lost past, calling back to an era when our visual communion with the cosmos dictated and empowered the very rhythms of existence.

As the installation glows, the swells of brightness demonstrate light pollution’s 10% annual increase, taken in accordance with 20 years of data. This growing radiance controls a model fed by the constellation microtones and trained on the invisible humming of electromagnetic field recordings of global human-made light sources.

What emerges is a widening chasm of disconnection mediated by the machine. Technology fails to restore the purity of nature, hindered by the restless and omnipresent anthropocene transmissions that have saturated the world.

A fragile hope remains in the potential for human healing, currently suspended in the limbo of myth and pseudoscience. We are left to wonder: are we still in control and capable of restoring what we destroyed, or is that capability merely an illusion, realized too late to discern?

Curator: Patrycja Maksylewicz

Thanks: Intermedia Art Krakow, ASP Krakow,  Icelandic Art Center.