Mutable Archive is an ongoing artistic project that investigates photography and sound as process-based systems rather than fixed records. Working within a post-photographic framework, the project treats images and field recordings as mutable material—archives that can be translated, displaced and recomposed over time.
Departing from conventional notions of the archive as a site of preservation, Mutable Archive approaches it as an active structure shaped by mediation, repetition and technological translation. Through custom-built generative methods, photographic and sonic material is continuously reorganized according to evolving internal rule sets, allowing the archive to function as an active process rather than a stable repository. Across still images and time-based works, the project examines how memory and perception are continually reconfigured through continual transformation rather than fixed representation.
Central to the project is a sustained engagement with landscape, understood not as representation but as a temporal and structural field. Landscapes are approached as layered constructs formed through movement, duration and mediated perception, where photographic and sonic material functions as traces rather than documents. Through gradual abstraction and recomposition, instability and transformation become fundamental conditions of the work.
Series V - A Generative Landscape Archive
Series V is based on photographic material collected in and around Flateyri, Iceland—a landscape marked by extremes of light, scale and geological time. Each image is not an endpoint but a temporary state within a continuously evolving archive.
At the core of Series V is a custom-built generative system that reorganizes photographic source material according to evolving internal rule sets. Rather than generating imagery independently of its source material, the system continually transforms existing photographs, allowing photographic fragments to establish new relationships through continual reconfiguration. Depending on which operations become active, the same photographic source material may evolve into fundamentally different image states, each representing one temporary configuration within a continuously evolving archive.
Across still images and moving image, the photographic image is no longer treated as a fixed representation of landscape but as photographic source material within a continuous generative process. Space and time become active agents within the work, while photography shifts from a medium of documentation to material within an open-ended generative process.
Excerpt from the time-based work Series V (looped, ~30 sec)