Turbulence

Turbulence is a single-channel video in which every movement is borrowed from water. Footage of rivers, waterfalls and hot springs is reduced to optical flow: a record of where, and how quickly, the water moves in each frame, with the image itself discarded. These fields of motion are then used to steer a diffusion model. The model supplies the picture; the water supplies only the current that carries it.

What the model is asked to imagine is water at each of the scales at which it shapes the world: bacterial colonies blooming across a wet plate, lichen spreading over stone, the mineral terraces of a hot spring, deltas and braided rivers seen from orbit. None of these places exists. Each is a statistical proposal, assembled from the model’s training images and set in motion by a river it has never seen. Across five sections joined by slow dissolves, the image passes from the microscopic to the planetary without a cut.