these appearances are merely electrical phenomena not uncommon (their ghastly origin in the rank miasma of the tarn) (2025) is an experimental digital video piece that explores the spectral possibilities embedded in AI-driven reinterpretation and software-derived disruptions. Using film stills from James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber’s 12-minute avant-garde adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), these static images were input into 3Daistudio to generate ambiguous 3D model interpretations. These unstable models form a series of dioramas—out of sequence, scrambled, and haphazardly composed toward abstraction.

This project is an appropriation of a fragment of filmic paranormal horror history, filtered through unpredictable spectral events in digital architecture. The dioramas include the derived 3D models and embedded, corrupted excerpts from the original film. These excerpts were glitched through Blender’s rendering process via intentional frame-skipping and then re-assembled with interpolative blending—forming a spectral, necromantic reconstruction, or regenerative decay.

The title is drawn from Edgar Allan Poe’s story, as is the audio—generated using text-to-sound AI to transform excerpts from The Fall of the House of Usher into an eerie, hovering presence.

The captions are generated through 3Daistudio’s automated labeling system, which assigns names based on machine recognition. Phrases such as “unidentified object in a dark environment” or “shadow of a hand against a wall” punctuate the video with estranged interpretations, never quite aligned with the perceived content. This misalignment between the machine’s reading and the source image enacts a poetic form of decay, where meaning degrades into approximation.

The work foregrounds narrative disruption in the original film’s already fragmented structure, amplifying its disarray through entropic AI systems and software glitches. By relinquishing partial artistic control to machines, the piece highlights nonhuman agency and reframes decay as both a degenerative and generative process. It is haunted equally by ghostly cinematic residues and digital artifacts—disordered timelines and unstable translations, spectral noise.

In reanimating a film already marked by abstraction, this work engages the archival not to preserve, but to exhume and dislocate. It signals toward the fragility of digital memory, the persistent dissolution of visual culture, and the poetic logic of error. The resulting video is not so much a well-composed piece coming from an artist's cinematic sensibilities; it is a product of a series of mechanical actions, technical miscomprehensions, and mistranslations.