2018
The side valley 谷边
The Side Valley is the artist’s first systematic exploration of the relationship between artificial intelligence and natural perception. The project began with an invitation from Audemars Piguet to visit the Vallée de Joux in Switzerland, including a factory tour, talks, and a journey through the valley. As such, the photographic documentation and initial data collection took place in the Vallée de Joux — the historical heartland of the Swiss watchmaking industry.
The work draws conceptual inspiration from the technological philosopher Lewis Mumford, who argued in his 1934 book Technics and Civilization that "the key machine of the modern industrial age is not the steam engine, but the clock." The invention of the mechanical clock detached time from its biological and natural cycles, transforming it into something measurable, divisible, and controllable — what Mumford called "industrial time." This shift restructured labor and daily life patterns and profoundly altered human perceptual systems and sensuous logic.
In The Side Valley, the artist seeks to activate a counter-temporality — what might be called non-linear time — by proposing that machines might be trained to re-perceive the rhythms of nature. At the summit of the Vallée de Joux, the team captured sky images every fifteen minutes from five fixed directions (north, south, east, west, and zenith) over 32 days, resulting in a dataset of 6,400 photographs. These images were not conceived as aesthetic endpoints but as input data: rhythmic encodings through which the machine could begin to "learn a sense of time."
The generative core of the system relies on three models built using deep learning techniques, based explicitly on the now widely adopted Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) architecture, a method particularly prevalent in image synthesis. In this work, GANs were employed to generate imagery and extract and internalize temporal correlations embedded in the dataset. The photographs were grouped into three temporal segments —morning, afternoon, and evening — and each group was used to train a distinct model. Through iterative cycles, each model learned to recognize patterns across its subset and generate new images reflecting those latent visual rhythms. Once trained, these models were deployed in a real-time generative system linked to Vallée de Joux’s lakeside environmental conditions. Live wind data — specifically, wind speed and direction—acts as the trigger for image generation.
To gaze upon the projected sky is to experience both the real as illusion and the illusory as real — a space that oscillates between clarity and depth, between surface simplicity and underlying complexity. Through its real-time connection to the environment, The Side Valley continuously invites viewers to explore the unknown within the known, meditating on time, perception, and the entanglement of human and machinic sensibilities.
Artwork by
Jiayu Liu
Project Managers
Stella Li, Li Xing
Artist Assistant
Sean Lu
Technical Director
Louis Mustill
Machine Learning Engineer
William Young
Film
Dong Ya
Music
James C. Wilkie
Editing
Wanlong Ma
Sponsor
Audemars Piguet
Commissioned by
Robb Report
First Launch Venue
Chao Art Centre. Beijing. CHN
Collection
Xie Zilong Photography Museum. Changsha. CHN