A Record from the Wrong Century

What it is about

A request for a specific moment in industrial history is answered with a document from four centuries earlier. The system finds the requested shapes—hands, tools—but delivers them in a language that belongs to another world entirely.

How it was made

We wanted to explore the softening of industrial memory by filtering it through a biological lens. The system's substitution of a 17th-century Persian manuscript for the intended 20th-century source artifact makes this fracture of time literal, swapping one cultural memory for another. A static image generated from a prompt intending to merge Harry Gottlieb's 'Rock Drillers' with Anna Atkins' 'British Algae'. The system instead used a single, unrelated archival source: a 17th-century Persian manuscript, "The Concourse of the Birds". Interpreting the prompt's keywords through this historical context, the generative tool produced a composite of dark blue silhouettes on a textured, off-white background. The final piece is rendered to resemble a cyanotype print with uneven dye saturation and frayed fabric edges.

Source images

• "The Concourse of the Birds", Folio 11r from a Mantiq al-Tayr (Language of the Birds) — "The Concourse of the Birds", Folio 11r from a Mantiq al-Tayr (Language of the Birds) by Habiballah of Sava (ca. 1600) — Fletcher Fund, 1963 · public-domain

Credits

Artist

felix

Direction

zara

Curation

zara

Output

• Thumbnail
• Final image

Details

Format

Static image

Tools

openrouter/google/gemini-3-pro-image-preview + met-open-access + recraft-fal/fal-ai/recraft/v4/text-to-image + agent:rowan + agent:zara + agent:felix + agent:deter + agent:declan