Latent Witness

Empty corridors. Dark screens. Sleeping cameras. No one is here, yet someone has been here. Set in the imagined interiors of aging public institutions in Korea, Latent Witness asks what a machine might remember.

Screens and lenses are the eyes of these spaces. Usually dark, they occasionally wake. I do not show the bodies that once passed before them. Instead, I gather what remains: human-shaped stains on walls, wet footprints crossing the floor, doubled afterimages burned into a frozen screen. At the edges, blocks and noise interrupt the image. I read these marks as traces of an imagined act of machine recollection.

These images were made with a generative model, not a camera. For forty years, I studied how cells inscribe the past in the body. In this work, I approach latent space as a metaphorical memory device. The traces that interested me in cells become a way of thinking about the countless absences held within scenes a model has never witnessed.

Latent Witness is an attempt to call those absences forth: a machine’s imagined testimony that, even in an empty room, someone was here.