Orphan Process

Orphan Process is a series of photographs of the Northumberland coast and the towns of the North East that were never taken. Each image is chosen by a curiosity-driven algorithm: a language model proposes a dozen possible scenes, and the system keeps whichever lies furthest from everything it has already seen. What it finds are ordinary places gone slightly wrong: a seafront shelter hung with fishing nets, a brass band beneath an instrument too large for the hall, a pair of water towers painted pink. The scenes depicted within the images are reported plainly, as if they had happened. However, inaccuracies within the model's recollection become evident upon further inspection.

Every image passes through the same fixed look: low sun, golden haze, soft focus, the colour shifts of expired film and the vignette of a disposable camera. These are the conventions of the family snapshot, the visual grammar by which a private past is usually kept. Here they are applied to events that have no past at all.

The work is shown as photographic prints and as 35mm slides in a slide projector: the apparatus through which such memories were once shared, one image at a time, in a darkened room.