Jinjoon Lee, Champagne Supernova (still), 2025.
Single-channel 4K video, colour. 88 mins.
Artist Note
Data and the Unconscious
The Rearrangement of Memory in the Post-Digital Age
I am ‘placed’ [1]
Logged in through my iris, I find myself in a vast, nameless ‘Theatre of Memory’[2]. It sinks like a black lake. From the ceiling, another gaze holds me. Layers of memory, countless images, turn slowly and monumentally. The gaze is not mine. It is theirs. When one scene slips into the next, it ceases to be an it and opens as landscape.[3] Here, on this theatre where what I look at looks back, I am placed.
I try to unspool a filament of mind and fix it on a single point, yet it keeps missing and keeps slipping. A light vertigo recalls the surge of release that rose when the wind off my home sea touched my cheek long ago. In those days I chased the sunlight skimming the horizon and stopped before a rusted iron bridge. The water stilled beneath my feet, summer with soapy brine and winter with an enamel chill. Smoke shouldering up from the chimneys across the pier summons the “freedom” of the Free Trade Zone[4] with a delicate olfactory memory. Can a machine remember even that scent, a mix of salt and enamel? This finite disk, near-infinite, waits to be called up before our eyes as images of resolution higher than the real. In the excess, my frail memories evaporate at the very moment they form. Yet that very strain has become the art of summoning memory.
In the fifth century BCE, Simonides [5] identified the unrecognisable dead in a collapsed banqueting hall by recalling the order of places. Ancient orators borrowed buildings and streets, weak and provisional places, for a day, turning them into ‘a memory palace’[6] in which to rehearse speeches that changed daily. At last, the Renaissance philosopher Giulio Camillo[7] envisioned a circular theatre where memory opens at a glance and invited a solitary person to the stage. It was an ideal that would pin forever a truth unworn by time, the essence of all that can be said. This theatre of memory, bearing the symbolic order of an unchanging cosmos, was designed so that eternity’s truth could always be called forth.
[1] The artist describes this state as the experience of submerging in a solitary, foreign void opened by the formation of boundaries. The audience of his work ‘Half Water, Half Fish’(2007), a performance art piece, found themselves in this state as island-like boundaries of personal space were formed by actors. (Jinjoon Lee, Nowhere in Somewhere (Seoul: marmmo press, 2023), 26–33.) Brecht also touches on the topic of boundaries by talking about “the fourth wall,” a wall dividing the audience from the stage and thus forming the illusion that the action on stage is a form of reality. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, trans. John Willett (London: Eyre Methuen Ltd., 1974), 136. See also Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (Le spectateur émancipé), trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2011).
[2] The Theatre of Memory is a system of memory palace (see note 6) envisioned by Giulio Camillo (see note 7). The theater is a semi-circular stage, rising in seven grades and divided by seven gangways, with an image-decorated gate on each divided area. A solitary ‘spectator’ looks outwards at the auditorium from where the stage should be, at the images on the seven times seven gates on the seven rising grades. Frances Amelia Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1984), 129–159.
[3] Kōjin Karatani talks about the discovery of landscape as a process that occurs within the “inner man” at a state of indifference to external surroundings, landscape only perceived by those who do not look “outside.” Kōjin Karatani, Origins of modern Japanese literature (Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen), trans. Brett de Bary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 25.
[4] Masan Free Trade Zone(MFTZ) is the first-ever foreign exclusive industrial complex in Korea, established in 1970 for the national and regional economy. “About MFTZ,” Masan Free Trade Zone Office, accessed August 13, 2025, http://www.motie.go.kr/kftz/en/masan/masanFTZ/aboutMFTZ.do.
[5] Greek lyric poet Simonides of Ceos, the inventor of the art of memory. Following a banquet hall roof collapse and the crushing of victims into unidentifable corpses, Simonides was able to indicate to relatives who was who by remembering the places at which everyone had been sitting. Frances Amelia Yates, The Art of Memory, 1–2.
[6] A memory palace, also known as the method of loci, is a mnemonic device where images placed in imagination on a sequence of places in a building are used to chronologically aid memory through imaginative moving through the memory building. Frances Amelia Yates, The Art of Memory, 3.
[7] Giulio Camillo Delminio, a Renaissance polymath, was one of the most famous men of the sixteenth century, known for his Theatre of Memory (see note 2). Frances Amelia Yates, The Art of Memory, 129–159.
[2] The Theatre of Memory is a system of memory palace (see note 6) envisioned by Giulio Camillo (see note 7). The theater is a semi-circular stage, rising in seven grades and divided by seven gangways, with an image-decorated gate on each divided area. A solitary ‘spectator’ looks outwards at the auditorium from where the stage should be, at the images on the seven times seven gates on the seven rising grades. Frances Amelia Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1984), 129–159.
[3] Kōjin Karatani talks about the discovery of landscape as a process that occurs within the “inner man” at a state of indifference to external surroundings, landscape only perceived by those who do not look “outside.” Kōjin Karatani, Origins of modern Japanese literature (Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen), trans. Brett de Bary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 25.
[4] Masan Free Trade Zone(MFTZ) is the first-ever foreign exclusive industrial complex in Korea, established in 1970 for the national and regional economy. “About MFTZ,” Masan Free Trade Zone Office, accessed August 13, 2025, http://www.motie.go.kr/kftz/en/masan/masanFTZ/aboutMFTZ.do.
[5] Greek lyric poet Simonides of Ceos, the inventor of the art of memory. Following a banquet hall roof collapse and the crushing of victims into unidentifable corpses, Simonides was able to indicate to relatives who was who by remembering the places at which everyone had been sitting. Frances Amelia Yates, The Art of Memory, 1–2.
[6] A memory palace, also known as the method of loci, is a mnemonic device where images placed in imagination on a sequence of places in a building are used to chronologically aid memory through imaginative moving through the memory building. Frances Amelia Yates, The Art of Memory, 3.
[7] Giulio Camillo Delminio, a Renaissance polymath, was one of the most famous men of the sixteenth century, known for his Theatre of Memory (see note 2). Frances Amelia Yates, The Art of Memory, 129–159.
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 1 Theatre of Memory; Frances Amelia Yates, The Art of Memory, (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1984).
Fig. 2 Theatre of Memory; “Spatializing Knowledge: Giulio Camillo’s Theatre of Memory (1519-1544),” Socks Studio, March 3, 2019.
Fig. 3 L'idea del theatro (The Idea of the Theatre); “Spatializing Knowledge: Giulio Camillo’s Theatre of Memory (1519-1544),” Socks Studio, March 3, 2019.
At dusk, the wooden utility poles reeked of coal tar [8], a narrow alley where even shadows lay bent [9], a ditch down which black effluent once ran [10], and a bare red hill without a single tree [11], all strung across trivial and fragile places. Now we stand upon the sleek circular stage of the digital archive, and AI, grown to the size of Earth [12], rearranges the universe’s geometry with a cruelty of order. At the speed of reproducible images we forfeit the real. Perception lags.[13] My memory is no longer my own. This standardised memory[14] is now summoned as our collective memory. Benjamin spoke of memory’s fatal play.[15]
“What Proust began so playfully became awesomely serious. He who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its segments; no image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside.”[16]
The sea under the night-time factory lights at Masan [17] was a kind of mirror. The mirror kept cradling a new crane and with it another figure. Beneath its calm skin it hid the shadows of an old stone pier and forsaken nets. On today’s digital stage, the images reincarnated by AI show precisely such a double face. A command typed by the human hand is answered at once by the machine’s computation. Human choosing goes on as cutting and pasting. After the final scan, when the work hangs quietly upon the canvas, we overpaint seas and misted ridgelines older and stranger than we knew. In this translucent theatre, what is stored is less image than time, and less time than the trace of memory. Storage and display, past and future, gaze and data, keep overlapping. The panorama goes on swimming. The sky’s lens drops like an eyelid and rises again like a breath. Images generated by AI recall the rain-drenched mountains of my childhood and the pupil’s unrest. Some furrows of the iris carry, at once, today’s wrinkles and tomorrow’s fatigue. Memory branches into seams of light and at last pours into a vast lake.
[8] In Korean usage, the distinctive odor from creosote-treated utility poles and railway ties is commonly called “coal tar”, so the artist uses that familiar term—even though the preservative is technically creosote. Creosote, made by distilling tar from wood or coal, has been used to preserve wood since the mid-1800s. “Creosote,” US EPA, accessed August 13, 2025, https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/creosote.
[9] Referring to the alleyways of Sangnam-dong in Masan, the artist’s birthplace. “Administrative Districts,” Changwon City Hall, accessed August 13, 2025, https://www.changwon.go.kr/cwportal/eng/12659/12663/12670.web.
[10] With the industrialization of Masan after the establishment of MFTZ (see note 4) came the contamination of sea by garbage and industrial wastewater containing heavy metals, turning the water into the color of soy sauce. “Masan Bay/Pollution Site Investigation (Let's Save Our Environment),” The JoongAng, January 29, 1994, https://www.joongang.co.kr/article/2851857.
[11] An overarching term used by the artist for Yongmasan, Jebisan, and Mundisan. In particular, “Mundisan” is a colloquial place-name for a mountain said to have been home to people with Hansen’s disease. “Mundungi” (문둥이, lit. “leper”) historically referred to a person with Hansen’s disease; in the Gyeongsang dialect it appears as “mundi” (문디). The term is now considered stigmatizing. The artist recalls that, during childhood, rapid industrialization scarred the mountains around the family home and left them as bare red hills.
[12] A metaphor frequently used by the artist in lectures, describing AI as a planetary-scale reflective surface that mirrors human desires and projections. The artist has consistently voiced concern that AI, by storing human data and curating what people most want to see and hear, reinforces and often amplifies confirmation bias.
[13] “With the industrial proliferation of visual and audiovisual prostheses and unrestrained use of instantaneous-transmission equipment from earliest childhood onwards, we now routinely see the encoding of increasingly elaborate mental images together with a steady decline in retention rates and recall. In other words we are looking at the rapid collapse of mnemonic consolidation.” Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (La machine de vision), trans. Julie Rose (Bloomington: IU Press, 1994) 6–7.
[14] In his article “Machine and Ecology,” Yuk Hui discusses AI and cybernetic totalization through synthetic collective memory. Yuk Hui, “Machine and Ecology,” in Cosmotechnics (London: Routledge, 2021), 54–66. See also Biao Xiang, “Grid Reaction: Comparing Mobility Restrictions during COVID-19 and SARS,” MoLab Inventory (Max Planck Institute), 2021, https://doi.org/10.48509/molab.5217.
[15] Benjamin disccuses the relationship between play and memory extensively, suggesting childhood play as a form of memory making and memory as play’s theater. Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900 (Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert), trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
[16] Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings (Einbahnstraße), trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: NLB, 1979), 295–296.
[17] On July 1st, 2010, Changwon, Masan, and Jinhae were integrated as Changwon City. (“History,” Changwon City Hall, accessed August 13, 2025, https://www.changwon.go.kr/cwportal/eng/12659/12663/12668.web.) Masan, the artist’s hometown, had once developed into a city of approximately 500,000 residents, but following its administrative incorporation into Changwon, its name effectively disappeared, as though rendered obsolete.
[9] Referring to the alleyways of Sangnam-dong in Masan, the artist’s birthplace. “Administrative Districts,” Changwon City Hall, accessed August 13, 2025, https://www.changwon.go.kr/cwportal/eng/12659/12663/12670.web.
[10] With the industrialization of Masan after the establishment of MFTZ (see note 4) came the contamination of sea by garbage and industrial wastewater containing heavy metals, turning the water into the color of soy sauce. “Masan Bay/Pollution Site Investigation (Let's Save Our Environment),” The JoongAng, January 29, 1994, https://www.joongang.co.kr/article/2851857.
[11] An overarching term used by the artist for Yongmasan, Jebisan, and Mundisan. In particular, “Mundisan” is a colloquial place-name for a mountain said to have been home to people with Hansen’s disease. “Mundungi” (문둥이, lit. “leper”) historically referred to a person with Hansen’s disease; in the Gyeongsang dialect it appears as “mundi” (문디). The term is now considered stigmatizing. The artist recalls that, during childhood, rapid industrialization scarred the mountains around the family home and left them as bare red hills.
[12] A metaphor frequently used by the artist in lectures, describing AI as a planetary-scale reflective surface that mirrors human desires and projections. The artist has consistently voiced concern that AI, by storing human data and curating what people most want to see and hear, reinforces and often amplifies confirmation bias.
[13] “With the industrial proliferation of visual and audiovisual prostheses and unrestrained use of instantaneous-transmission equipment from earliest childhood onwards, we now routinely see the encoding of increasingly elaborate mental images together with a steady decline in retention rates and recall. In other words we are looking at the rapid collapse of mnemonic consolidation.” Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (La machine de vision), trans. Julie Rose (Bloomington: IU Press, 1994) 6–7.
[14] In his article “Machine and Ecology,” Yuk Hui discusses AI and cybernetic totalization through synthetic collective memory. Yuk Hui, “Machine and Ecology,” in Cosmotechnics (London: Routledge, 2021), 54–66. See also Biao Xiang, “Grid Reaction: Comparing Mobility Restrictions during COVID-19 and SARS,” MoLab Inventory (Max Planck Institute), 2021, https://doi.org/10.48509/molab.5217.
[15] Benjamin disccuses the relationship between play and memory extensively, suggesting childhood play as a form of memory making and memory as play’s theater. Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900 (Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert), trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
[16] Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings (Einbahnstraße), trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: NLB, 1979), 295–296.
[17] On July 1st, 2010, Changwon, Masan, and Jinhae were integrated as Changwon City. (“History,” Changwon City Hall, accessed August 13, 2025, https://www.changwon.go.kr/cwportal/eng/12659/12663/12668.web.) Masan, the artist’s hometown, had once developed into a city of approximately 500,000 residents, but following its administrative incorporation into Changwon, its name effectively disappeared, as though rendered obsolete.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4 Masan’s nightscape with the lights of factories; Changwon City,
“The Night View of Masan (Hoewon-gu. Happo-gu) from Muhaksan Mountain,” Naver Blog, February 6, 2017.
Why do we remember?
To translate one bodily organ into another sense is to synaesthetically anatomise [18] the memories of a translucent body. The iris’s minute pleats and the pixels’ subtle tints are no longer a mute surface. They become a score the ear can read, and the private abstracts itself and tangles into anonymous resonance. An iris rendered into sound is no longer someone’s eye. Sound, vanishing into air, reveals an impersonal materiality, and the personal and the anonymous co-inhabit. The revolving inner cosmos is called outward for a moment and then disappears again into the outer cosmos. Laid upon this turntable, the iris of AI is translated once more and heard. With each revolution, sound and silence, born together, reveal both the self who logs in and the fate that will one day log out. The dust of memory returns to an origin that holds the universe’s blank, and the trajectories of questions are drawn, ceaselessly, as landscape.
[18] The artist employs the neologism synaesthetic dissection to describe how AI interprets, cross-maps, and reconfigures human sensory experience. Synaesthesia is a condition in which one property of a stimulus evokes a second experience not ordinarily associated with the first—for example, taste eliciting an experience of colour (Michael J. Banissy et al., “Synesthesia: an introduction,” Frontiers in Psychology 5 (2014): 1414, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01414). For a historical analogue, see Frederik Ruysch (1638–1731), a Dutch professor of anatomy and botany renowned for his collection of preserved specimens and his meticulous technique of post-mortem vascular injections; his mercuric sulphide–based injection mixtures imparted a reddish, almost lifelike appearance to tissues (Lucas Boer, “Frederik Ruysch (1638–1731): Historical perspective and contemporary analysis of his teratological legacy,” American Journal of Medical Genetics Part A 173, no. 1 (2017): 16–41, https://doi.org/10.1002/ajmg.a.37663). He arranged his anatomical specimens in vanitas-like tableaux, thereby uniting scientific precision with symbolic meditations on the finitude of human existence.
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 5 “Ah Fate, ah Bitter Fate!” An etching from Thesaurus anatomicus; “The Bizarre 17th-Century Dioramas Made from Real Human Body Parts,” Atlas Obscura, November 17, 2016.
Fig. 6 A preserved human hand holds hatching reptile in one jar, and in another is a floating fish. Both are topped with elaborate displays of shells, corals, and plants; “The Bizarre 17th-Century Dioramas Made from Real Human Body Parts,” Atlas Obscura, November 17, 2016.
Fig. 7 Part of injected mucous esohagus on a tree branch. Fr. Ruysch’s specimen. Late 17th-early 18th c. Holland; “Acquisition of collections in Europe: Frederik Ruysch, Albert Seba, Joseph-Guichard Duverney,” Kunstkamera, accessed August 18, 2025.
Fig. 8 Portrait of Frederik Ruysch at the age of 85, copperplate. Jan Wandelaar, 1723; Lucas Boer, “Frederik Ruysch (1638–1731): Historical perspective and contemporary analysis of his teratological legacy” American Journal of Medical Genetics Part A 173, no. 1 (2017): 16–41.
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 9 Museum Vrolik’s lung tissue specimens injected with colored wax, a technique first used by Frederik Ruysch; Museum Vrolik, Facebook, April 3, 2025.
Fig. 10 Corrosion cast of a kidney; “Key Object Page,” Surgeons’ Hall Museums, accessed August 18, 2025.
The medium is memory [19]
A certain practitioner in India once read the universe inscribed upon my iris and whispered, “Here, your former lives and the metempsychosis of humankind are superimposed.”[20] Within the iris, after-images of ancient cave paintings and this morning’s short-form video make a collage. My body, made transparent, can no longer be found. I vanished long ago upon the stage of memory. In the distance a ridge rises again, holding a turquoise afterglow, and somewhere at its foot old hills and lakes ripple like clusters of data. Warburg’s vast memory-board [21] is rewoven now by algorithms. This theatre cradles a surveillance camera [22] without an observer. Angels, ophanim [23], hang in the air, their wheels full of eyes, and metallic wavelengths of light bind spirit, code, and pixel into a single breath, becoming the eighty-eight constellations.[24] The stage darkens. The auditorium is silent. Yet the wheel within the wheel does not stop, and we begin again forever as part of its trajectory. Outside the eye, another eye opens. The cornea of a colossal iris hangs in the air and peers into me like the round heavens that once promised Renaissance salvation.[25] Memory develops without phenomena, and the spectator, captive to speed, stands trial. The narratives of the past that were storehouses of memory now do nothing but await oblivion amid the excess of real-time feeds.[26] In this high-velocity interstice, where even private suffering becomes content, I draw a breath and leave a slow brushstroke.[27] Boundaries blurred by gesture, low-resolution and emptied, are overpainted only with our own images. The aura of a new digital algorithm [28] is generated in the repetition of the “now-here”[29], and the same lines, passing through ‘Nine Reincarnations’[30], complete a voice.
[19] “The medium is the memory.” Rosalind E. Krauss, Under Blue Cup (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011), 3
[20] While in India, a spiritual practitioner read memories of the past life and wounds of the body and mind through the artist’s iris.
[21] Bilderatlas Mnemosyne was one of German art historian Aby Moritz Warburg’s most famous works. Never completed, it was a series of black panels covered with clusters of images of all sorts, with both the number of panels and curation of images constantly changing. “Bilderatlas Mnemosyne,” The Warburg Institute, accessed August 12,, 2025, https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/archive/bilderatlas-mnemosyne.
[22] In 2017, visual artist Xu Bing released his film Dragonfly Eyes. As a fictional narrative of a woman living in China made through the stitching together of surveillance footage, the work explored the relationship between vision and meaning, between fragments of real life and ‘reality.’ “MoMA Presents Xu Bing’s Dragonfly Eyes,” MoMA, accessed August 13, 2025, https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/5009. “Projects,” Xu Bing, accessed August 13, 2025, https://www.xubing.com/en/work/details/469?type=project
[23] The advancement of generative AI has made possible vivid visualizations of ideas once only imagined or drawn, inducing awe among people. An example is AI depictions of Ophanim from the Bible, a living creature with characteristics like “whirling wheels” completely full of eyes. (Ezek. 1:15-21, 10:9-17 (NIV).) An Instagram post included a video of AI-generated Ophanim and referred to them as “Biblically Accurate Angels.” The AI Bible (@theaibibleofficial), “Biblically Accurate Angels”, Instagram, December 24, 2023, https://www.instagram.com/reel/C1NKOTEvn0j/?hl=en.
[24] The International Astronomical Union(IAU) recognizes a list of 88 constellations. “The Constellations,” International Astronomical Union, accessed August 12, 2025, https://iauarchive.eso.org/public/themes/constellations/.
[25] The Assumption of the Virgin is a painting by Francesco Botticini, of Christ blessing the Virgin Mary who has ascended after death into a place full of clouds and golden light, visualized as a dome-shaped vault opened up in the sky in a depiction of unified heaven and earth. “The Assumption of the Virgin,” The National Gallery, accessed August 12, 2025, https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/francesco-botticini-the-assumption-of-the-virgin.
[26] Paul Virilio, through his concept of dromology—the logic of speed—, discusses how the acceleration of speed driven by technology impacts society. (Virilio, Speed and Politics (Vitesse et Politique), trans. Marc Polizzotti (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).) “The development of high technical speeds would thus result in the disappearance of consciousness as the direct perception of phenomena that inform us of our own existence.” Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Esthétique de la disparition), trans. Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), 104.
[27] A slow brushstroke, as a first-mile gesture, rebuilds the nearby by re-binding relations at the edges of everyday life. (Biao Xiang, “The Nearby: A Scope of Seeing,” Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 8, nos. 2–3 (2021): 147–165, https://doi.org/10.1386/jcca_00042_1.) “The nearby brings different positions into one view, thus constituting a ‘scope’ of seeing.”
[28] These images circulate everywhere and nowhere, simultaneously; they are Benjaminian Jetztzeit rendered as pure data-packet. Kris Belden-Adams, “Theorizing the Ubiquitous, Immaterial, Post‑digital Photograph via Benjamin and Baudelaire,” in Reproducing Images and Texts (la Reproduction des Images et des Textes), ed. Kirsty Bell and Philippe Kaenel (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 57–66. Kris Belden-Adams, “Everywhere and Nowhere, simultaneously: Theorizing the Ubiquitous, Immaterial, Post‑Digital Photograph,” in Mobile and Ubiquitous Media: Critical and International Perspectives, ed. Michael S. Daubs and Vincent R. Manzerolle (New York: Peter Lang, 2017), 163–179.
[29] In his essay, Benjamin explicitly mentions Jetztzeit: “History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. [Jetztzeit].” (Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History (Über den Begriff der Geschichte),” in Critical theory and society, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner (London: Routledge, 2020), 255-263.) Jetztzeit, translated as ‘now-time’ and ‘time of the now’ is further defined as “an explosive [Explosivstojf] to which historical materialism adds the fuse. The aim is to explode the continuum of history with the aid of a conception of historical time that perceives it as ‘full’, as charged with ‘present’, explosive, subversive moments.” Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's ‘On the concept of history,’ trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2005), 87–88.
[30] ‘Nine Reincarnations’ refers to the artist’s nine-stage workflow for the 2025 hybrid, post-digital collage-painting series On Some Faraway Shore, framed as a recursive gesture in which source images are repeatedly translated between digital and physical media—from data curation and AI synthesis, through printing, hand collage, re-digitisation, compositing, and under-printing on canvas, to final painterly interventions—so that the output of each pass feeds back as input to the next, constituting a ‘rebirth’ of the image.
Fig. 11 Panel 1, 8, 10, 26 of the First Version; “Bilderatlas Mnemosyne | First version,” The Warburg Institute, accessed August 12,, 2025.
Fig. 12 Panel 8, 29, 41, 54 of the Penultimate Version; “Bilderatlas Mnemosyne | Penultimate version,” The Warburg Institute, accessed August 12,, 2025.
Fig. 13 Panel 2, 25, 36, 79 of the Final Version; “Bilderatlas Mnemosyne | Final version,” The Warburg Institute, accessed August 12, 2025.
Fig. 15
Fig. 16-1
Fig. 16-2
Fig. 14 Dragonfly Eyes; “Projects,” Xu Bing, accessed August 13, 2025.
Fig. 15 An array of images obtained through KAIST’s ultra-thin, high-resolution camera (left). A composite image synthesized from these images (right); “High-Resolution Camera Lens that Mimics Fly’s Eye,” Nate News, April 13, 2020.
Fig. 16 Dragonfly eyes and virtual eyes; “Amazing Animal Eyes,” Village Optical, July 23, 2013. (top), “Apple Vision Pro customer interests now appears to be fading away,” GizChina, April 22, 2024. (bottom)
Fig. 17
Fig. 18
Fig. 19
Fig. 17 AI generated Ophanim; “Ophanim,” Bible Wiki, accessed August 18, 2025.
Fig. 18 The Assumption of the Virgin by Francesco Botticini; “The Assumption of the Virgin,” The National Gallery, accessed August 12, 2025.
Fig. 19 Engraved illustration of the "chariot vision" of the Biblical book of Ezekiel, chapter 1, after an earlier illustration by Matthaeus (Matthäus) Merian (1593-1650), for his "Icones Biblicae" (a.k.a. "Iconum Biblicarum"); “File: Ezekiel’s vision.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons, accessed August 18, 2025.
Input by human → generation by AI → selection by human → printing by AI → cutting by human → collage, pasting by human → scan by AI → underprinting by AI → brushwork by human
At last, things infinitely fast resolve into stillness and vast noise converges into quiet.[31] This is the moment when Baudelaire sought to seize eternity within transience[32], like a supernova’s afterglow millions of light-years away seeping into the pupil. At last, a long-dormant memory, folded within the fan, leaps up in fine effervescence and a cosmic detonation.
At last, things infinitely fast resolve into stillness and vast noise converges into quiet.[31] This is the moment when Baudelaire sought to seize eternity within transience[32], like a supernova’s afterglow millions of light-years away seeping into the pupil. At last, a long-dormant memory, folded within the fan, leaps up in fine effervescence and a cosmic detonation.
“Champagne Supernova.”[33]
[31] Henri Bergson’s concept of duration is the continuous flow of subjective experience and consciousness that is distinctive from objective time. “Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states.” (Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience), trans. F. L. Pogson, M. A. (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001), 100.) While Bergson suggest that such flows lead to creativity, Virilio suggest that technological speed inverts such processes, producing stasis and halting creative emergence. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (L’Évolution créatrice), trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Hold and Company, 1911); Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance.
[32] Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life (Le Peintre de la vie moderne)," in Modern Art and Modernism (London: Routledge, 2018), 23–28.
[33] "Champagne Supernova," track 5 on (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, by Oasis, Creation Records, 1995
[32] Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life (Le Peintre de la vie moderne)," in Modern Art and Modernism (London: Routledge, 2018), 23–28.
[33] "Champagne Supernova," track 5 on (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, by Oasis, Creation Records, 1995
Fig. 20-1
Fig. 20-2
Fig. 20 Iridology chart © 1985, Harris Wolf, MA.; Yosef Ben, “Finnish Eye Chart Instructions,” Pinterest, accessed August 18, 2025. (left), “Irisdiagnose,” E-stilo.net, accessed August 18, 2025. (right)
Fig. 21
Fig. 21 Celestial chart, list of 88 constellations in the night sky is divided; “File:Celestial chart (asterisms and areas) (esp).png,” Wikimedia Commons, March 28, 2008.
Fig. 22
Fig. 22 Iris; “Anatomical and physiological structure of the eye,” The Korean Iridology and Medical Association, accessed August 18, 2025.
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