DYCP Application Round 17
Eden Chahal
Selected work
babylon_finalfinal_v00
2023 - babylon_finafinal_V00 was exhibited in the joint exhibition Overflow at hARTslane Gallery in London (March 2023).
It is the first of a series of models about lost cities, and how they can inform us about the ones to come.
An inverted tower of babel is surrounded by a vaporous metal scaffolding. Inside its pyramid, windows overlook cities that don’t exist. These images were generated in collaboration with a text-to-image machine learning algorithm. It was made with the drive to reflect upon language and its possible contemporary evolutions and decays.
OVERFLOW, hARTslane gallery, LDN 2.5 Oct.2023
Where the tower stood - AI generated aerial view of the possible site
A Tale of 10.000 cities
2022 - A Tale of 10.000 cities is a script that generates many possible movies written with code, sound and architecture about human experiences of inhabiting cities.
Architecture is used as a material, an alphabet with which a language is constructed. Code is incorporated into the structure of the stories, it becomes its grammar. This project is about what happens when a language is hybridised with another.
The video installation is a spatial translation of the project, in which you never visit the city of the person sitting next to you.
1. Spectacle for Later Festival, Rio Cinema, LDN 18.20 Nov.2022
2-7. Sub-systems, St James Hatcham Building, LDN 1.5 Sept.2022
"The life we lived without a city"
2021 - The life we lived without a city is about the places we have lived, the ones we lost, and those we learnt to love through the imaginaries of others.
A child falling asleep to buildings flying by the window, in the backseat of a car; a melody that relentlessly brings us back to a night walk along the river; the melancholic eyes of passersby; that lady in pink having breakfast on her balcony; the Weeping Willow tree at the corner of your grandmother's house…
This piece is not about construction, it is not about a city. It is about our perception of spaces, the way we inhabit them physically and build them mentally.
By establishing a dialogue with technology, it explores ways of building texts and images, and absorbing it, outside of its traditional formats, where tools are not only means to convey a message but central actors of the project. The object is a machine that generates fiction through texts written in the form of letters in which the narrator describes his city to a person they wished could visit it.
'and you, what are you searching for?'
2021 - The title of this interactive fiction makes reference to the book of Rene Daumal, The Analog Mount.
It is a story about a quest towards what first appears as an imaginary place. He wrote it while he knew he was condemned, and passed before he could write the last chapter that was meant to be titled “And you, what are you searching for?”. Every object holds a story about inhabitants of the apartment, you will only meet them through these artefacts, gathering fragments of the life that might have happened, projecting your fantasies over their stories. You will have to collect them in a specific order. When found, objects open new spaces allowing you to reach for the following one. Once you collect a fragment, it is yours to get back to, by pressing its corresponding icon on the right side of your screen. On your quest, you will notice distorted gates. By passing through them, you will be offered two paths to build an environment and a story. Some hold sounds that might bring images to your mind, others will trigger objects to appear. You can build other memories at any point by going to the table of content. This also allows you to take a break from the game, or read this foreword again.
Peckham Digital Festival, Eagle Wharf London 2-5 February 2023
AI's Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris
2020 - For three consecutive days in October 1974, French writer George Perec sat at Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris. His intent was to make an inventory of this urban square, to describe “(...) what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds”.
When entering the room, you will navigate soundscapes of the Place Saint-Sulpice, and read the descriptions of an AI, in its Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, over 3 consecutive days of December 2020. This project is part of a research on recording places and mapping them into exhibition spaces.
This project falls within a wider interest and research about building narrative tools, archives of places, making installations about physical spaces without using physical materials. It is an attempt to start feeding questions such as:
What remains of a space once it is striped out of its physicality? What technologies can be used to capture, record and deliver, in the context of an exhibition, the experience of a place?
