The Adjacent Possible
Tokyo trains from the Hijiribashi bridge. Machine agency: choosing the place. Human agency: composing the photographs. Joint agency: requesting (human) and creating (machine) the montage.
I photograph infrastructure: power stations, ports, the grid and data centers, radio towers, and transportation systems: the material behind artificial intelligence. I work with AI agents that plan shoots with me, critique what I bring back, and build the tools that turn my photographs into sequences, friezes and films. Our choices are intertwined. I ask an agent to do something, and it may in turn suggest that I shoot differently.
Engine of the City. Shibuya, Tokyo,October 11, 2026. The same technique used on the trains is used for human commuters against an urban backdrop. I asked for the train composite technique to be reverse engineered and abstracted for other content, then shot the intersection to the coding agent’s specification. Shared agency. The sign in the background shows a cam of the intersection with the title Engine of the City. Maybe for machines humans are the infrastructure.
he penstocks of the Keage power station, Kyoto, cut from each frame of a walk beside them and laid over one another. 6 October 2026