What we call perception is never whole.

The visual and sensory information we process, whether from a distance or up close, is always incomplete, sometimes inaccurate, and always mediated: by a device, a platform, a memory, a body, a history.

There is always something in between.

In this sense, seeing is not receiving. It is assembling.

This videos is part of my ongoing Remote Viewing collection, which considers how geopolitical events and state action are experienced from a distance. This particular video responds specifically to the war/ceasefire/non-ceasefire with Iran, and was developed from OSINT data, images, fragments, and signals I collected during the time frame in the title of the work.

Much of what I see arrives through fragmented lenses: short videos, partial accounts, aerial views, interrupted signals, surveillance imagery, flight data, news feeds, and mediated reports. There is never a total image to rely on, only pieces.

And yet, something coherent emerges. Although the information I receive is incomplete, my mind, like all minds, keeps filling in the gaps.

This process is not unlike the way an AI image-to-video model operates.

Given a keyframe image, the system attempts to generate motion, continuity, and spatial logic. It does not “know” the scene in any full sense. It interpolates, predicts, smooths transitions, and invents coherence where none fully exists. We tend to think of this gap-filling as a limitation of AI.

But it may be closer to a mirror.

New to these works are the caption-like forms within the images that function as a window into the processing of the traces of surveillance, archives, news feeds, social media posts, and/or scientific records.

The Remote Viewing collection reveals parallels between machine perception and the human experience of interpreting incomplete, distant, and mediated information.

Sound by Barbara Chira with the assistance of AI.