I WAS ALREADY WONDERING WHERE I AM – POLYPHONY OF MIGRATED-SELD

Plexiglass prints, animated projections, sound installation, December 2022



The second part of HIDDEN is my reflection on the history of military camouflage technologies. It refers to the 1900s when Abbott Handerson Thayer discovered the mimicry principles of animals. In his book ‘Concealing-Coloration In The Animal Kingdom,’ he showed different animals in their natural habitats and how they mimic the environment. The book was made for children who had to find animals in the pictures. His work was noticed by American militants who started using founded principles.

In 1942 William John Dakin, a professor of Zoology at the University of Sydney from 1929 to 1947, wrote a book called ‘The Art Of Camouflage’ where he continued Thayer’s explorations and found other camouflage principles which became a base of colouring modern militant equipment.

AI-generated camouflage patterns on the plexiglass semi-transparent prints create the game part of the project: moving and reflecting, they hide the stopped images, forcing the viewer to look closer. Patterns were created by the generative adversarial network StyleGUN. These could become a theoretically new ‘way’ of producing camouflage prints. The data set for generating patterns was collected from locations where photographs were shot.


Sound – Segei Losev