The Sunset I Almost Shared

Live image-reading probe / ongoing research, 2026

The Sunset I Almost Shared is a live interactive work that stages the moment before a beautiful London sunset image is edited, captioned and shared. The work treats this familiar gesture as a point of convergence, where atmosphere, AI-assisted image transformation, platform aesthetics and human interpretation begin to act on the same image.

Using live London atmospheric data from CAMS / ECMWF via Open-Meteo, the work allows particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide, ozone and aerosol optical depth to subtly shape the image’s surface, colour, residue and instability. The sunset becomes a responsive visual field: fine particles settle into the image, urban traces gather near the horizon, violet afterglow lingers, and the image shifts between visual pleasure and environmental evidence.

AI appears as a cultural condition of seeing. As the image becomes smoother, warmer and more desirable, its environmental traces become harder to read. Viewer interaction changes this relation. Through movement, touch and attention, hidden particles, unstable captions and atmospheric residues re-emerge, turning the act of looking into a form of ecological interpretation.

The work grows from my ongoing practice around image culture, mediated environments and data-informed visual systems. I am interested in environmental signals that are already visible within everyday images, but remain culturally unread. Sunset imagery becomes a precise site for this inquiry because it sits between beauty, atmosphere, pollution, platform circulation and public feeling.

The Sunset I Almost Shared forms part of my wider research project Towards Ecological Legibility, which explores how AI-assisted visual methods, environmental data and participatory annotation can create new conditions for ecological interpretation. This work opens a space between artistic image-making, technical systems and human judgement, where environmental meaning is negotiated through looking, pausing and re-reading. Future development will expand this inquiry through visual probes, shared reading sessions, annotation workshops and a public research archive, exploring how everyday images can become sites of ecological awareness, discussion and participation.

Ongoing research: this live probe will be updated as the project develops through further image experiments, annotation methods, shared readings and public-facing research materials.