Equipped with a rough LiDAR setup—a hacked-together scanner and an old laptop—I wandered through Paris collecting fragments. LiDAR, a technology that measures distance with light, usually promises precision. But mine stuttered. It caught ghosts instead of forms, echoes instead of edges.

The data came back as clouds of points—thread-like, broken, beautiful. Layer upon layer, these digital filaments tangled into something like fabric. Not quite a body. Not quite a map. Just traces. A city remembered by a machine that couldn’t quite see straight.