haunting horizons

As you explore, perceive, and engage with Lutruwita/Tasmania, are you reading the island landscape, or is it reading you? How do you find your way on the island? The immersive and interactive audiovisual installation, haunting horizons, arises from the artist’s situated memories of self in place, shaped by his everyday experiences along Nipaluna/Hobart’s scenic waterfront, across shifting times of day and changing seasons. Translating his island practice into a training dataset, he fine-tunes a text-to-image diffusion model using carefully captured, captioned, and curated image-text pairs, saturated with subjective and affective self-narratives. Alongside a generative polyphonic sound piece crafted from his figurative line sketches of Kunanyi/Mount Wellington, it has re-rendered the island landscape into a view in constant flux — at once familiar and uncanny. In this real-time environment generated by customised AI, participants are invited to navigate with their physical bodies, revealing shifting and unstable imagery and animating its form, flow, and features through individual or collaborative choreographies of movements in space, continuously captured by motion-tracking sensors. As AI and human participants simultaneously take on the roles of subject and object, an interplay unfolds between the generated landscape and those who both sense and shape it, mediated by an intimate yet ambiguous dialogue that reflects our complex relations to island place.

CREDITS
Adam Hsieh (concept development/art direction/production)

MATERIALS
Projector, speakers, motion sensor, computer with customised software

DIMENSIONS
Variable

EXHIBITIONS
Between Realms, Dark Mofo (2025). Good Grief Studios, Nipaluna/Hobart, Australia. 5 - 15 Jun 2025.