Gazing at water has long been regarded as an aesthetic activity that has pleased many scholars, artists, nobles, and monks. In ancient Greece, hydromancy was created by one of the gods and served as an important divinatory practice. In Korea and China, it was a pure joy for scholars (in Korean, Seon Bi), who sought to learn humility and generosity from the water. In this work, the artist investigates the aesthetic dimension of water, considering both its visual and auditory qualities, traversing from filmed to AI-regenerated to synthesized versions of water flow.

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This audiovisual performance is about technologically mediated water flow, suggesting gazing at the metamorphosis of water from actual to AI-regenerated states as an aesthetic activity. To achieve that, various recent technologies that enable machines to speculate and vary on the water are employed, including diffusion models, flip fluid simulation, and physical modeling synthesis.

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The artist feeds short video clips of water flow, along with the corresponding water sounds, to the machine. The sources are recorded from nature reserves in Norway, Sweden, Japan, and Korea. The machine then analyzes and transforms parts of the video, which include dissolving into AI-regenerated flows, imposing simulated flow over the real flow, or cross-fading into a resynthesized soundscape.

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Consequently, the audiovisual elements of the video proliferate and echo in unexpected ways, transforming into endless variations of water flow during the performance. The inherent contingency of water flow in nature becomes an ordered artistic pattern with the audiovisual sequencer controlled by the artist, and it is enchanted once again by the pseudo-chaotic nature of AI regeneration techniques. This call and response between a human artist and an AI, each with a completely different structure of recognizing water flows, forms the core concept of this artwork.​

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