Similar Rubble

“Similar rubble” is a video-art installation that blends hand-drawn animation, machine vision, and archival materials to explore spectral resemblances between devastated urban spaces in Berlin and beyond. Anchored in Berlin—a city marked by loops of destruction and reconstruction, shifting borders, and fragile promises of refuge—the piece traces the ways that ruins are seen, remembered, and made to resemble. Berlin is (not) (only) Berlin. Images of the city’s undoing buckle with the weight of other places and histories.

The video is anchored by four “key frames”: archival photographs of Berlin’s shattered homes and streets, from WWII to the 1990s. These served as prompts (or “inputs”) for a cosine model to select similar images from a corpus of over 800 images scraped from Wikicommons. Archival images of Berlin and not-Berlin are strung into a sequence. Spliced between each are hand-drawn frames, created with graphite-based media. These translations between photographs offer a gestural counterpoint to algorithmic vision, refusing the fluidity of machinic morphs. Whereas the algorithm delineates resemblance statistically, the hand grasps at shreds of perceptual memory. Here, graphite is not just a medium, but a method for working through what it means to see one city through the destruction of another.

The video is looped and projection-ready. Audio is single-channel.

Robyn Holly Taylor-Neu