Tilt

Field Almanac: Harvest No. 007, Tilt Farm: Native Gesture Tract ID: Faulty Topography Gesture Yield Taxonomy: Distorted Cartography Notes: What happens when a map forgets how to stay flat? In “Tilt,” what begins as aerial photographic images of the simplest of sites—a road, a shed, a line of poles—becomes unrecognizable. Images smear into liquid motion, overlays skew into phantom architecture, and in places the ground itself rises as if modeled in three dimensions. The system cannot hold its own vantage: it tilts, flips, and distorts until landscape becomes hallucination, and the map slides into a world of its own making. 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.