OBSERVER NOTES
OBSERVER NOTE / 001
There is a point at which explanation begins to diminish an idea. Some things become more powerful when their edges remain uncertain.
WHY THE UNKNOWN MATTERS
OBSERVER NOTE / 002
THE OBSERVER CHANGES THE SYSTEM
How looking, interpreting, and documenting something changes our relationship with it.
OBSERVER NOTE / 003
Opinion: Authorship exists through selection, direction, judgement, iteration, and construction rather than simply producing an image.
AUTHORSHIP AFTER GENERATION
OBSERVER NOTE / 004
Before I was building systems around signals and observation, I was trying to photograph something I couldn't see. The question was surprisingly simple: can sound leave a visible trace?
I WANTED TO SEE SOUND
OBSERVER NOTE / 005
THE INSTRUMENT DOES NOT EXPLAIN THE PHENOMENON
An instrument can record an event with extraordinary precision. But the moment we decide what that event means, measurement becomes interpretation.
OBSERVER NOTE / 006
MAKING THE INVISIBLE LEGIBLE
Some things cannot be observed directly. They become visible through traces, patterns, and consequences. I keep returning to how we make those hidden systems readable.
OBSERVER NOTE / 001
WHY THE UNKNOWN MATTERS
I have always been more interested in what is not completely explained.
An object becomes more interesting when its purpose is uncertain. An environment becomes more believable when it appears to continue beyond what can be seen. A symbol becomes more powerful when you understand that it means something, but you are not immediately told what.
I think explanation can sometimes make an idea smaller.
There is a tendency in design to resolve everything. To make the function clear, remove ambiguity and guide the viewer towards a particular understanding. There are good reasons for this, but I am interested in what happens when some of that certainty is deliberately withheld.
The unknown creates space for the observer.
They begin looking for relationships, recognising patterns and constructing their own explanations. A fragment can suggest a much larger system. An incomplete record can imply a history. Something barely visible in an image can become more important than the subject itself.
This has become increasingly important in my work.
I don't necessarily want to create mystery for the sake of being mysterious. I want things to feel as though they existed before they were encountered. That there are histories, systems, and events operating beyond the immediate frame.
Sometimes I know what something is before I make it.
Sometimes I deliberately don't.
And occasionally, the process produces something I hadn't anticipated. Rather than immediately explaining it, I have learned to leave it alone for a while.
The unknown is not always a problem waiting to be solved.
Sometimes it is the part that makes you keep looking.
OBSERVER NOTE / 002
THE OBSERVER CHANGES THE SYSTEM
I used to think of observation as something passive.
You look at something, document what is there, and try to understand it. But the more I work with images, systems and constructed environments, the less convinced I am that observation works that way.
The moment we decide what to look at, we have already made a choice.
We frame one part and exclude another. We recognise certain patterns because of what we already know. We give things names, establish relationships and begin constructing an explanation around what we have seen.
The observer becomes part of the system.
This idea has gradually influenced the way I work. I am interested not only in creating an image or object, but in imagining how it might be encountered, recorded and interpreted. Sometimes the documentation becomes as important as the thing being documented.
A photograph becomes evidence.
A diagram suggests that someone has measured something.
An archive implies that somebody decided what was worth preserving.
None of these things are neutral.
The same applies to the creative process itself. When I generate or discover something unexpected, my decision to keep it, discard it, alter it, or connect it to something else changes what it becomes.
I am no longer simply looking at the work.
I am participating in its construction.
Perhaps this is why the idea of the observer continues to appear throughout what I make. It creates a useful distance between myself and the work, while also reminding me that complete distance is impossible.
We change the things we observe.
And sometimes, by observing them long enough, they change the way we think in return.
OBSERVER NOTE / 003
AUTHORSHIP AFTER GENERATION
Making an image is no longer always a single act.
A machine can generate an image in seconds, but I don't think that means the creative process has been reduced to those few seconds.
For me, generation is often where the work begins.
An initial result might contain something useful, something unexpected, or nothing worth keeping at all. I make a judgement. I change the direction. I remove things, introduce constraints, rebuild relationships and generate again.
Sometimes this happens dozens of times.
The decisions accumulate.
What interests me about working with generative systems is that authorship begins to move away from simply making every individual mark. It can exist through selection, direction, rejection, editing, sequencing, and the construction of the larger system around an image.
This doesn't remove the human from the process.
It changes where the human is operating.
I might not have physically drawn every surface in an image, but I am responsible for deciding why that surface exists, what belongs beside it, what needs to disappear, and whether the result contributes anything to the larger idea.
The same image in another context could mean something entirely different.
That context has to be constructed.
This is why I don't see generation as a replacement for creative judgement. If anything, having almost unlimited possibilities makes judgement more important. The ability to produce more does not automatically tell us what is worth producing.
The machine can propose.
It can surprise me.
It can even take the work somewhere I hadn't intended.
But eventually I have to decide what remains.
For me, authorship hasn't disappeared.
It has moved into the decisions.
OBSERVER NOTE / 004
I WANTED TO SEE SOUND
I have always wanted to see sound.
Years ago, while studying, I became interested in cymatics: the process of making vibration visible through matter. A frequency passes through a surface, and particles begin to move. At particular resonances, they settle into lines, geometries, and increasingly complex patterns.
Something invisible becomes visible because of what it does to something else.
I became fascinated by that transition.
My research eventually formed around a very simple question:
Can sound frequencies be photographed?
I began developing an experiment that combined cymatics with Kirlian photography.
The idea was to introduce a controlled sound frequency into a plate carrying conductive particles. The vibration would move those particles into a pattern determined by the resonant behaviour of the surface. That pattern would then be subjected to an electrical charge and recorded onto photographic paper through the resulting discharge.
In simple terms, I was trying to construct a chain:
sound → vibration → pattern → electrical discharge → image
At the time, I was also interested in whether different frequencies might produce different colours, and whether there could be relationships between sound, light and the way we perceive them. Some of the research I encountered moved much further into ideas about biofields, auras, healing frequencies and other interpretations that were considerably more speculative.
Looking back, I don't think those claims are the most interesting part of the research.
The experiment itself is.
A sound does not need to possess a hidden colour or mysterious property for something remarkable to happen.
It only needs to interact with a system.
The plate becomes an instrument.
The particles become evidence.
The photograph becomes a record of an event that could not be seen in its original form.
What interests me now is that I was not really trying to photograph sound itself.
I was trying to photograph its effect.
There is an important difference.
We encounter invisible systems constantly through their consequences. We cannot see gravity, but we observe what it does. We cannot see a radio transmission travelling through a room, but an instrument can detect it and translate it into something we can understand.
The instrument becomes an intermediary between the phenomenon and the observer.
I had not thought about my old research for some time.
Finding it again made me realise that the experiment feels strangely familiar.
The materials have changed.
The technology has changed.
The questions have become larger.
But the impulse remains.
I am still interested in signals, patterns, traces and things that suggest the presence of systems operating beyond what can immediately be seen.
I am still constructing ways of looking at them.
Perhaps I never really wanted to see sound.
I wanted to know what the invisible leaves behind.
OBSERVER NOTE / 005
THE INSTRUMENT DOES NOT EXPLAIN THE PHENOMENON
Something is convincing about an image produced by an instrument.
A photograph feels like evidence. A measurement feels objective. A pattern recorded repeatedly begins to suggest that something has been proven.
But an instrument can only record what it has been designed to detect.
It does not necessarily explain what has been detected.
This became apparent while I was researching Kirlian photography.
The images are extraordinary.
Electrical discharge surrounding an object produces luminous edges, branching structures and fields of light. Around organic material, they can appear almost alive. It is easy to understand why these images became associated with ideas of auras, energy fields and other invisible properties surrounding living things.
I was interested in those possibilities.
But I also encountered a much simpler explanation.
The light being photographed could be understood as corona discharge: ionisation occurring around an object subjected to a high-voltage electrical field. Moisture, conductivity, pressure, the surrounding atmosphere and the photographic process itself could influence what appeared in the resulting image.
And importantly, living things were not required.
Keys, coins and other non-organic objects could produce these luminous fields as well.
The phenomenon was real.
The interpretation was uncertain.
That distinction stayed with me.
It is tempting when we encounter something unexplained to immediately construct a reason for its existence. We recognise a pattern and give it meaning. If the result resembles something we already believe or understand, the connection becomes even easier to make.
But evidence that something happened is not necessarily evidence for why it happened.
The instrument has no opinion about this.
It detects.
It measures.
It records.
The observer does something different.
We compare the result with what we already know. We decide which variables matter. We establish relationships between separate observations. Eventually we construct a model that explains what we think we are seeing.
Sometimes that model is correct.
Sometimes it is incomplete.
Sometimes the instrument is detecting exactly what we expected, but for entirely different reasons.
I find that uncertainty increasingly interesting.
It creates a space between phenomenon and explanation.
A signal can be detected without knowing its origin.
A pattern can repeat without understanding what produces it.
An anomaly can be measured without knowing whether it represents something significant or simply a behaviour of the system doing the measuring.
The existence of evidence does not automatically resolve the unknown.
Sometimes it makes the unknown more precise.
Looking back at my earlier research, I think this is more important to me now than the original question of whether an aura could be photographed.
The experiment did not need to prove an invisible energy field.
It demonstrated something more fundamental about observation.
We construct instruments to extend our senses.
Then we have to decide what to believe about what they show us.
The instrument can reveal the phenomenon.
It cannot tell us what the phenomenon means.
OBSERVER NOTE / 006
MAKING THE INVISIBLE LEGIBLE
Looking back at my earlier research, I recognise something that has continued through much of what I make. I am interested in things you can't see directly.
Sound was one of the first. I could hear it and feel its effect, but I wanted to see what it was doing. Cymatics provided one answer. A frequency passing through a surface could reorganise matter into a visible pattern. The sound itself had not become visible; what I was seeing was the consequence of an interaction.
The invisible had left a trace.
I think we understand many things this way. We rarely encounter a system in its entirety. Instead, we observe fragments of its behaviour: a repeating pattern, a disturbance, a measurement or a change in position. From those fragments, we begin constructing an understanding of something larger.
This is where visualisation becomes more than simply making something visible. It becomes a process of making something legible. A pattern may be visible but meaningless until relationships begin to emerge. A signal may be detectable but unreadable until it can be compared with another. We create diagrams, maps, symbols, photographs and archives because the phenomenon alone is often not enough.
I recognise this throughout my work now. I repeatedly return to signals, observation, documentation, measurement and classification. I create objects and environments that suggest functions, histories or events beyond what is immediately understood. Sometimes I know what caused them and sometimes I don't. What matters is that they suggest something larger than the individual image.
Making something legible does not mean making it certain. The observer still has to interpret what has been presented, connect fragments, and decide whether separate pieces of evidence belong to the same system. Another observer might construct a different explanation.
When I found my old research again, one sentence stood out:
I have always wanted to see sound.
At the time, I meant it quite literally. Now I think I was interested in something broader: taking what existed beyond my immediate perception and finding a way to give it form.
The instruments have changed, and the questions have become more complex, but I am still looking for traces and constructing relationships between them.
Still trying to make the invisible legible without explaining it completely.