Nubes In Tempore: Radial Translation

Animation of individual Python-processed video frames based on scanned stamp marks and recorded time-lapses.

Radial Translations extends a body of generative work in which I have, over the past several years, translated clouds, in the form of videos, photographs, and animations, through digital and digitized tile sets: painted marks, stamped marks, and drawn shapes, each captured from studio originals and reassembled in code via Python.

Until now, these translations have resolved onto a grid. The source imagery was sampled and rebuilt cell by cell, the tile set standing in for pixels, the grid holding the composition in orthogonal order. Radial Translations leaves that grid behind. Here the same translated marks are recomposed in a circular, radial structure, arranged in concentric rings rather than rows and columns. The image is read from the centre outward, and the tile set organizes itself around a single origin rather than across a flat field.

The shift is not only formal. A grid implies a frame, an edge, a Cartesian logic inherited from the screen and the printed page. A radial composition implies a source, a centre from which form propagates, closer to how clouds actually gather and disperse, and closer to the natural systems the source imagery is drawn from. Radial Translations is one of the first manifestations of this expanded generative concept, a step out of the grid and toward compositions that grow from a point rather than fill a plane.

https://mlo.art/artwork/radial-translation/