V · Now — Numen

Albany Town Hall and the street outside, dissolved into drifting points of coloured light

After the vast sweep of deep time, Now comes to rest. A single present instant — this building, and the street outside it — held long enough to become strange. The world arrives as drifting points of light that gather and dissolve, never quite settling.

Theme

The present instant, closely attended. A pause after deep time.

What you see

Now is made from the place you are sitting in. Albany Town Hall and the street outside it were walked with a camera that sees in every direction at once, and from that walk the building was rebuilt — not as a picture, but as light held in space.

One frame was kept from every two seconds of the walk, 308 in all, and every person who passed through was masked out, so the Town Hall stands emptied of the people who were in it. Each frame was cut into twenty views — 6,160 of them — and every view was located against every other, recovering where the camera stood and the shape of what it saw (Schönberger & Frahm, 2016).

The Town Hall’s front steps, foundation plaques and doors, with the street empty of people on either side, as rebuilt from the walk — The Town Hall’s front steps and the street outside, rebuilt from 6,160 views — and emptied of people

From those views the scene was learned, over 200,000 training iterations, as 2.5 million Gaussians: small translucent patches of colour, each with its own position, size and orientation, which together hold the look of the building from any angle (Kerbl et al., 2023). The camera moves toward the Town Hall’s front, then inside and out through its walls, as through a memory.

Soft clouds of warm and cool colour hanging in darkness, the loosening shapes of a street — 2.5 million patches of colour, loosening

Then it comes apart. The patches are reduced to 1.37 million single points of light, and the points drift, change colour and flow; focus comes and goes.

A dark field of coloured points, the faint masses of the Town Hall, the street and a tree emerging from them — The building reduced to single points of light

The narration moves the other way — inward, through minerals and atoms, empty space held by forces you cannot see, quantum fields — and back to this room, this breath, this now. Almost all of an atom’s mass sits in a nucleus a hundred-thousandth of its width; the rest is a haze of probability, held together by forces that cannot be seen.

Points of light scattered like a nebula, drifting apart — 1.37 million points of light, drifting

Sources

Schönberger, J.L. & Frahm, J.-M. (2016). Structure-from-Motion Revisited. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 4104–4113. doi:10.1109/CVPR.2016.445
Kerbl, B., Kopanas, G., Leimkühler, T. & Drettakis, G. (2023). 3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering. ACM Transactions on Graphics 42(4), 1–14. doi:10.1145/3592433

Numen is an artwork. Most of its imagery is original; some is derived from the scientific data, simulations and images credited above, transformed into new work. We have tried to identify and credit every source. If you believe something has not been credited properly, please get in touch.