THE TUMBLEWEED CITIES

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Tumbleweed is a term commonly used to refer to plants that have the unique ability to break away from their roots when dry and move freely, tumbling under the influence of the wind. The project name “The Tumbleweed Cities” is a relevant metaphor for describing artificial digital cities generated by the world of illusions, which are isolated from their geographical, political and socio-cultural context, without reference to a map and bordering nothing. Such cities are a kind of wanderers, digital nomads. Their landscapes, created by AI algorithms, are strikingly similar to real, familiar, recognizable cities, but in no way are their real images. The impression created by the neural network resembles a dream, when we perfectly understand where we are, but the place we dreamed about does not have any visual correspondence to its prototype in reality.

Each of these cities is a traveling artificial planet with its own coordinate system and a pivot attached to it. Their digital homeland, their space is the interface of the three-dimensional program that gave birth to them, where they continue their unencumbered existence. We – Internet surfers, digital nomads – are the inhabitants of these Tumbleweed Cities, these tumbling bubbles floating freely in the digital air with individual coordinate axes. But one day, perhaps, we will want to go back, and suddenly will find that our heavy, real cities rooted in the earth no longer exist. 

My project uses images of cities generated by the Mdjourney artificial neural network for the query “City name/photo/highly detailed/realistic”. Currently, the project will include cities such as Seoul, Ulaanbaatar, Jerusalem, Brussels, Rome and New York. The resulting images served as a mapping for spherical bodies floating freely inside the scene of the 3D modeling program. The sound track is the noise of the planets recorded by NASA, against which the GPT Bot tells us about his impressions of the “seen”.