Small, situated experiments provided a way to explore emergent narratives, allowing insights to develop through process rather than through predefined analytical categories. The smallness and practicality of these experiments allowed for a highly responsive and adaptive approach. Working with low-threshold, mundane consumer technologies, I could act and react swiftly with local environments without being hindered by excessive planning or technical complexity. This enabled me to engage directly with the material conditions of each site, seeking dynamic, real-time interactions. These experiments were designed as spontaneous encounters rather than controlled studies, allowing me to participate in the process of meaning-making without fully dictating the outcome. Each experiment functioned as a site of relational engagement, where agency was dynamically distributed among the elements involved.
On a rainy October morning in The Hague, I entered De Nieuwe Passage: a shopping arcade of polished glass, patterned floors, and carefully designed flows. A space not made for storytelling—but for passing through. And yet, I asked: what if this mall could become a narrative agent?
This was the starting point of my first experiment. It was not just a study of a place, but a co-created encounter between human, architectural, and technological forces.
I set up two interconnected systems. The first was a body-camera entity: a phone mounted on my jacket took photographs as I walked, guided not by artistic intent, but by the rhythm of my own movement. The resulting images were fed into a photogrammetry application. The software constructed a 3D model—but it filtered out people.
This was not an error, but a computational choice. The algorithm privileged architectural permanence and erased transient bodies. What emerged was a fossilized image: a space emptied of human presence, rendered stable, symmetrical, and clean. A haunting image of what the arcade wanted to be.
In the second experiment, I placed a laptop at a fixed point. Its camera recorded the play of brightness across frames—caused by passing shoppers, moving shadows, reflected light. This data was processed through custom code and translated into layered sound: a heartbeat oscillator for immediate motion, and a long, ambient hum for sustained rhythms.
Together, these two systems—visual and sonic—created a split reality. The first froze the arcade’s structural logic into an artifact. The second listened to its unfolding tempo in real time. One preserved. One alive.
This revealed a central tension in my research: between live processes and preserved narratives. I call this suspended relationality—the shift from real-time, intra-active meaning-making into artifacts that can be revisited but no longer respond .
And it revealed something else: technological systems are not passive. They act. They decide. The camera, the code, the photogrammetry software all participated in constructing the narrative. They carried their own logics, their own biases—reinforcing some aspects of the site while filtering out others .
This work is part of expanded photography. It treats the image not as a static representation, but as a process—a negotiation between human, machine, and site . Here, photography becomes an event. Sound becomes an imprint. The mall becomes an author.
Meaning didn’t pre-exist in the space. It emerged through interaction. The algorithm’s erasures, the structure’s influence on movement, the flow of visitors—all became part of the story.
De Nieuwe Passage is no longer just a shopping mall. It became a site of shared narrativity: a place where human, technological, and spatial agents co-authored a temporary, shifting story.
This is not a story about a storm.
It’s a story made with a storm—told through wind, trees, light, sound, code, and my own presence. What you hear is not a soundtrack or a recording. It’s the sound of an encounter—of different forces interacting in real time.
I placed my laptop between the roots of a birch tree, its camera pointing up toward the sky. As storm Conall passed overhead, it moved the branches, shifted the light, and made the trees sway. A custom code on the laptop turned those changes in brightness into sound.
I didn’t try to capture the storm. Instead, I let it shape what happened. The storm was one voice in a conversation between nature, machine, and human.
At some point, I brought my hands into the frame—not to control the process, but to join it. I moved with the rhythm of the trees. My gestures changed the light, which changed the sound. The storm responded to me as I responded to it. This created a loop: movement became light, light became sound, sound shaped my movement again.
This moment was alive. And then it passed. What remains is this sound—a kind of fossil. A trace of something that once happened between us. It doesn’t carry the full presence of that moment, but it still speaks of it.
This work questions what photography can be. There is no camera shutter, no visual image. But it is still a way of sensing and responding. A way of being present.
I didn’t make this piece alone. The storm helped shape it. The trees translated its force into movement. The camera and code made that movement audible. My role was to set things in motion and listen carefully to what unfolded.
This is what I call a shared narrative space—a place where meaning comes not from one voice, but from many forces coming together.
This story was not told. It emerged.
This is not a story about a storm.
It’s a story made with a storm—told through wind, trees, light, sound, code, and my own presence. What you hear is not a soundtrack or a recording. It’s the sound of an encounter—of different forces interacting in real time.
I placed my laptop between the roots of a birch tree, its camera pointing up toward the sky. As storm Conall passed overhead, it moved the branches, shifted the light, and made the trees sway. A custom code on the laptop turned those changes in brightness into sound.
I didn’t try to capture the storm. Instead, I let it shape what happened. The storm was one voice in a conversation between nature, machine, and human.
At some point, I brought my hands into the frame—not to control the process, but to join it. I moved with the rhythm of the trees. My gestures changed the light, which changed the sound. The storm responded to me as I responded to it. This created a loop: movement became light, light became sound, sound shaped my movement again.
This moment was alive. And then it passed. What remains is this sound—a kind of fossil. A trace of something that once happened between us. It doesn’t carry the full presence of that moment, but it still speaks of it.
This work questions what photography can be. There is no camera shutter, no visual image. But it is still a way of sensing and responding. A way of being present.
I didn’t make this piece alone. The storm helped shape it. The trees translated its force into movement. The camera and code made that movement audible. My role was to set things in motion and listen carefully to what unfolded.
This is what I call a shared narrative space—a place where meaning comes not from one voice, but from many forces coming together.
This story was not told. It emerged.
What connects these works is not a linear storyline, but a method of co-creation. Meaning is not imposed by a singular author; it emerges in the space between: between camera and architecture, storm and sine wave, city noise and pixel. This is narrative as intra-action—as something shaped by multiple agents, unfolding through encounter.
A recurring motif across the work is the fossil. Some outcomes—like the 3D model of De Nieuwe Passage or the sound-grown images of Tokyo—act as media fossils: preserved traces of live interactions, shaped by algorithmic and environmental rhythms. Others, like the collaboration with Storm Conall, exist only in their liveness—a fleeting, sensory dialogue that resists capture.
This project uses transduction as a storytelling method: a way of translating between light and sound, movement and rhythm, space and image. Transduction enables hidden agents—architectural flows, wind patterns, sonic textures—to speak in unfamiliar but perceptible ways.
In this framework, the artist becomes less an author and more a facilitator of relations. The role is not to tell the story, but to set the stage for stories to unfold—stories that are shaped by the environment, by machines, by weather systems, and by the listener’s own presence.
Through these experiments, Stories Without an Author offers a glimpse into a different mode of storytelling—one that is collaborative, sensory, and open-ended. A storytelling that listens before it speaks.