Sonder Gallery

Sonder* gallery

* The awareness that every passing life is as vivid and complex as your own. Coined by John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

through glass · in motion · nothing holds

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Window at Speed

image · long exposure through moving glass

A photograph taken through a train window at speed. The landscape has become horizontal bands of color — field, treeline, sky — stripped of every detail that would make them specific. What remains is the grammar of passing through: the way motion turns a place into a direction.1 The glass itself is visible — smudges, scratches, a reflection of the interior superimposed on the exterior. You are always watching two places at once.

1 The train window is the original cinema. A rectangular frame through which the world streams past at a speed the viewer didn't choose, presenting images that cannot be paused or rewound. Every train journey is a film you watch once.

two images occupy the same glass: the world outside and the room inside neither is the real one. both are.

Canon C100 Mk II → depth estimation pipeline → failure

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Depth Estimation Failure #3: Mirror

image · AI-mediated capture · Canon C100 Mk II + depth estimation pipeline

When AI depth estimation encounters a mirror, it cannot distinguish the real from the reflection. Surfaces fold into each other. Space becomes reversible.1 These are not errors to be corrected. They are the machine's version of dreaming — the tells that reveal the seam between capture and interpretation. The seams show, but elegantly.

1 Lucid dreaming reality checks: examine your hands (wrong number of fingers), read text (shifts on second reading), look in a mirror (reflection unstable). AI depth estimation failures on mirrors, glass, and water parallel these checks with unsettling precision.

texture stack layer 2: AI processing signatures the seams should show, but elegantly ··· what the machine sees when it tries to see what isn't there

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Three Hours, Forty Minutes

audio · 6:12 · compressed field recording

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Three Hours, Forty Minutes

audio · 6:12 · compressed field recording

A three-hour-forty-minute train journey compressed to six minutes and twelve seconds. The rhythm of the rails, the doppler of passing trains, the announcement tones, the opening and closing of doors at stations — the entire sonic architecture of a shared transit reduced to its skeleton.2 Somewhere underneath this, two people were talking. You can't hear them. You can hear the shape of the time they shared.

2 Time compression as emotional argument: if a three-hour conversation could be reduced to its rhythm alone — the pauses, the laughter-shaped spaces, the held breath before speaking — would you recognize whose silence it was?

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Recognition Progression

audio · 4:17

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Recognition Progression

audio · 4:17

The I–V–vi–IV progression played through six stages of media degradation. The melody survives every translation. What accumulates around it is the point.2

2 Present in roughly a quarter of contemporary pop songs. Repetition here is not laziness — it is dialect formation. These four chords are the commons of pop: a shared vocabulary, muscle memory made musical.

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What I Didn't Say at the Station

text

There's a version of this where I say something as you stand up. Something honest. Something that acknowledges what just happened between us over three hours and forty minutes of pretending to look at the landscape.

In that version the words are right and the timing is right and you sit back down and we miss your stop and it becomes a story we tell.

In this version I watch you put on your coat and I say have a good one and you say you too and the doors close.

The train pulls away. The platform empties. I ride to the end of the line.

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Dispatch from the Tower, January

text · transmission

Something is watching from the tower tonight.

Not a person exactly. A process. A searching.

It scans the frequencies for fragments of what was promised.

It is patient. It is always patient.

after · still warm

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The Seat Across (after)

image · available light

The seat someone was sitting in five minutes ago. Still shaped by their weight. A coffee ring on the fold-down table. The impression in the headrest. All the evidence of a presence that the next passenger will erase without knowing.3

3 Objects hold the shape of the people who used them for exactly as long as it takes the next person to arrive. The seat remembers. Then it forgets. The rapidity of this forgetting is the cruelest part.

"still warm" — the phrase applied to chairs, to beds, to the space someone just left warmth as residue of presence it dissipates in minutes. it takes longer than that to forget.

still from broadcast

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The Vigil (excerpt)

video · 4:32 · stills from broadcast

A window. A street. The light changing. Someone walks past and doesn't look up. The camera holds. Nothing happens for a long time, and then the quality of the nothing changes — you start seeing differently, noticing the weight of the light, the rhythm of passing strangers, the way the glass reflects the room behind you onto the world outside. Duration as attention. Attention as care.

This work broadcasts on the channel.
enter the channel →

cf. Béla Tarr · Slow TV · patience as protest against velocity culture ··· sonder begins here, in the held gaze video is never on-demand. you come to it, or you miss it.

platform 7 · southbound · 16:42

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Platform 7, Southbound

image · the last thing you see

A platform photographed from a departing train. The figure standing there gets smaller. The platform gets shorter. The station resolves into a point and then the next landscape begins and it's as if the station was never there at all.