trapped in a loop of almost
a serial excerpt of 90 photographs; texts developped in reference with Perplexity & ChatGPT 
inkjet print on paper
lever arch clips, clear file sleeves
29,7 x 21,0 cm each

as part of the exhibition "Invisible Cities", shown together with works by Anna Raczyńska, Ilinca Fechete + Barbara-Rosa Siévi, Philip Nürnberger & Valentin Wedde.
Accompanied with a talk by Manuel van der Veen.

30.11. –08.12.2024
frappant, Hamburg

![](/static/img/_dsf0856_1.jpg "exhibition view, \\"trapped in a loop of almost\\"")

online extension/archive:
https://dervierteraum.org/#invisiblecities

The project "trapped in a loop of almost" is an endeavor to engage in an experimental and dialogical mode of writing, utilizing AI tools to explore the intersection of language, visual representation and association. Through this process, the work seeks to transition from the visual content as represented, toward layers of meaning that surpass and ultimately diverge from the initial depiction, thereby probing expanded modalities of image recognition.

The methodological framework involves the iterative analysis of a curated selection of 90 photographs, taken between 2018 and 2024 during psychogeographical explorations of sub-urban spaces. These images were subjected to successive examinations with AI tools such as Perplexity and ChatGPT, employing a "deep view" approach that integrates layered interpretation. Central to this inquiry is the attempt to cultivate a language marked by associative excess and cognitive leaps, to excercise a way of generative writing: Transcending the immediate visual content, emerging within the processual alienation inherent in the AI-mediated "conversation".

This engagement with text-based AI methodologies is conceived as a processual snapshot of a larger, ongoing project. It illuminates the dynamics of linguistic aggregation, wherein words, phrases, and disjunctions fragment the textual narrative through marked passages, generating nodes for subsequent development within a framework of visually oriented writing practices. By iteratively reinterpreting the photographic material, the project aims to investigate generative approaches to the synthesis of language and imagery, specifically within the context of examining the traces and residues embedded in urban environments.

Fragments of an invisible forum

In a passage by Foucault, which I can no longer find, he writes that it is not about making the invisible visible, but rather about making the invisibility of the invisible visible. An observation that is as obvious as it is powerful. But how can we perceive, discuss, or treat the unseen? It is already easy for us to fall into contradictions when we talk about our perception of visible objects. (On the one hand through the language system, on the other hand through our differing perceptions). An invisible object is, in the etymological sense, an exemplary oxymoron: something that is thrown at us but that we do not believe to be true. We stumble, we get tangled up in the unforeseen spider webs. To perceive something in German literally means to believe in its existence. Conversely, that would mean that something invisible is something whose existence is not believed to exist. Strictly speaking, the emperor‘s new clothes are not invisible as long as everyone still believes in their existence. However, as soon as it is questioned, their quality changes from present to absent. Access to the invisible can perhaps be broken down into access to the real (even if it is still of a more directly uncanny nature). Something that is not visible (e.g. a UV value, an algorithm, a virus, a social fact, a gust of wind...) can only be recognized through a detour of formalization. Through a gesture of filling a content chamber. A container is filled with a formalized invisibility and can become perceptible. For example, a circumstance can be perceived as soon as someone allows it to flow into a text. A gap in the fence can become as soon as it is enclosed in the fence surrounding the gap. An island is only an island as long as it is an enclave of the sea. As long as the invisibility is not framed, it is subject to unspoken contingency. It is defined by non-impossibility and non-necessity. Only with its usurpation from the sphere of the clandestine does it choose a realized potential. We only see the wind whisking in the fluttering laundry on the line.

Text by Benno Hauswaldt, 2024.


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The gap between tactical as well as mythological model and its realizations is bridged through conceptual approaches to lens-based media, installation, sculpture, and video. In an attempt to reflect upon and deconstruct future visions proposed by politics, economics, and technology for urban living, the exhibition navigates the mediation of the construction of thought, augmented space and its real world parameters. By analyzing various facets of the threshold between the social and the private, the virtual and the symbolic, such a project lastly seeks to reproach those tendencies which have brought it into place, whilst and through transforming them, suggesting an extension, beyond sight.