UNLAND

UNLAND presents both documented and fictional material of the Cyprus buffer zone, Varosha, and British military bases, as well as areas of bicommunal activity and farming.

Taking two years to complete, the artists Rose Butler, Jeremy Lee, and Kypros Kyprianou, focused on moving the representation of these complex spaces beyond navigation, illustration, aestheticisation or documentation.

For a downloadable pdf of the UNLAND gallery guide, visit: https://neveroddoreven.org/gallery-guide/.
For gallery information visit UNLAND at NeMe, Cyprus. Some press about the project can be found here.

For UNLAND, I used machine learning in a number of works that explore the relationship between online archives, mapping and image making along the past present and future of the buffer zone. The form that each of these pieces take span pre-photographic and post-photographic techniques – from drawing and printing, to chemical photography, digital photography and computational photography. These works, alongside and in conversation with the works by Rose Butler and Jeremy Lee in UNLAND, attempt to shift the relationship between the expectations of photographic documents and their experiential encounter.

News from UNLAND, which at first glance might appear to be a newspaper, was generated by machine learning text-to-image programmes, using solely the text captions of historic newspaper images in articles about Cyprus (1950+) that have been scanned or photographed and uploaded online …more…

Photographic technologies spanning the 19th to the 21st century combine with human and machine learning memory in the stereoscope series Unland Imaginaries and Distance_depth matte street views real or imagined. I turned views from Google Street View from either side of the buffer zone in Nicosia into stereo images and reinterpreted them using text-to-image machine learning. Each stereo pair is modified through instructions that are either fragments of interviews of Nicosian refugees remembering their lives before 1974, or image recognition software interpreting the architecture and paraphenalia of the buffer zone images themselves …more…

The work 35.1264°N, 33.4299°E (point centre) is one of a series of Journey to the Centre Of… films in which I travel both virtually and physically to what is designated as the very centre of somewhere and then point at it both with and without the aid of machine learning. In this case, the co-ordinates of the title are the centre co-ordinates of Cyprus according to Google Maps ...more…

In Unphotography I enlist the help of machine learning in attempting to remember and recreate trying (and failing) to take a photograph at the buffer zone in central Nicosia almost forty years ago …more…

Simulator uses old ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ stage illusion trickery together with two Google Earth journeys over the length of the island of Cyprus. One journey shows land demarcated as British Sovereign territory and U.N. patrolled buffer zone, the second journey shows ‘other’ …more…

Buffering is made to resemble a computer forever stuck on a loading screen. The animating icon has been replaced by a spinning outline of Cyprus, the keyboard and mouse disconnected from the perpetual (in)action …more…

Unisland remaps the different zones that cut into the island – British ‘Sovereign’ territories, buffer zone areas, and the islands of North and South that these create. Instead of marking them as lines on a map, they are encountered one after another as joined up islands, reuniting the whole of the island in a joined up island line …more…