Organised Chaos
2023-Ongoing

In Organised Chaos, I examine how lived space is translated into presentable form, and what disappears in the process.
               Over the years, I have repeatedly photographed streets in Taiwan. Sometimes I return to the same location across multiple visits, taking dozens of images from shifting angles. These acts of accumulation began as a response to distance: living in London since 2015, I photograph compulsively because what I fail to capture may not be there when I return.
               The collected photographs are printed and rescanned, stripping them of their original digital data. They are then reconstructed through photogrammetry or Gaussian Splatting, technologies rooted in military surveying and territorial mapping. In this process, photographs are evaluated against algorithmic standards of coherence. Those that do not conform are eliminated. Those that remain are merged into a unified model. I reposition a virtual camera within the reconstructed space and re-photograph it. The resulting images are renamed using only latitude and longitude coordinates.
               This renaming is not neutral. Coordinates appear objective and scientific, yet they perform a specific kind of violence: reducing environments dense with memory, language, and personal history into abstract numerical designations. A temple where my grandmother sought refuge becomes a coordinate. A street I associate with childhood becomes a coordinate. The act of naming completes what the reconstruction began.
               The images retain visible intensity: fragmentation, distortion, high contrast. These are not stylistic choices alone. My photographic language carries the imprint of Japanese street photography, a visual culture absorbed across generations in Taiwan through decades of cultural proximity. When I photograph Taiwan, I do so through a way of seeing that has already been shaped by another culture's image-making tradition. The reconstruction adds a further layer: Western computational technology reorganising the material according to its own logic. And the coordinates impose yet another: a global system of classification replacing local, embodied names.
               Each stage of the process is a translation, and each translation is an act of power. Organised Chaos does not document Taiwan. It makes visible the structure through which any representation is produced: the accumulated layers of cultural influence, technological mediation, and systemic abstraction through which space is made legible. No step in this chain is innocent. And there is no original, unmediated image to return to.