Clipping Suburbia – Tokyo by Lee Day

Issue 162

Moments jam up against each other.
Staring from a train hurtling through the city, the world flashes by.
A mangled jumble of screen impressions seen and not seen,
Racing forward in a distraction of thoughts thrown out by
Cloud-computed algorithms.

We are making a new digital world for ourselves. Gone is the slow leisurely pace of thought and lifestyle. Driven by frictionless connectivity this Digital Life is a headlong rush, and it feels like it.

These photos are an expression of the speed, the cascade of experiences that are a defining aspect of this brave new world. And while my work is primarily an exploration of how this digital world feels to me, I’m also interested in questioning how the algorithmic devices we populate our lives with experience this very same environment – i.e. how does an AI see the world?

The Clipping Suburbia series is generative at its core, the content of images compiled entirely by an AI in the iPhone. It is struggling to cope with the ‘novel experience’ of capturing a panorama from the train window flying through space, creating these images of time and space compressed, of fragments flowing together to create a digitized impression of the world racing by. It makes me question if AI’s see in the same beautifully formed 3D technicolor renderings as we do? Perhaps their world is a Frankenstein of fragmentary bitmaps, or perhaps something else, entirely of its own imagining.

The two worlds are not separate. As we incorporate more and more artificial intelligence into our daily lives we are merging. We increasingly experience our world through their eyes, through their senses.

Lee Day lives and works in Bearsville, New York.
leeday.photography | @leeday.photography