This section gathers a series of reports produced during field mediations conducted with the (v)Ideogrammatic Writing Machine [v]IWM. Each account reflects a situated experience where the machine, in dialogue with the elements — wind, light, terrain — engages in a transductive process that seeks to reveal a certain idea of landscape. These are not technical reports in the conventional sense, but narrative-inscriptive gestures that document moments of convergence between the machinic apparatus and the natural world.
The [v]IWM operates as a compound system of technical components that register, transform, and poetically inscribe phenomena. Through image, sound, and algorithmic logic, the machine mediates a territory in flux — a landscape that resists stable representation. These reports, therefore, emerge not as objective measurements but as resonances of an encounter, traces of a mediation that is always partial, situated, and open to reinterpretation.
What follows are fragments of this ongoing process — each report a diagrammatic inscription of a place, a time, and a machinic encounter with the world.
Essay 1: Cabo do Mondego — Cliffs
This first mediation exercise took place on the coastal cliffs of Cabo do Mondego, a site of considerable geological significance and symbolic resonance. Known as a locus of continental drift, the area is marked by sharp rock formations, wind corridors, and sonic vibrations from oceanic wave breaks — elements that frame it as a point of exception in Simondonian terms.
The [v]IWM was deployed in this environment to explore a diagrammatic inscription of the landscape through machinic perception. Here, the fluctuating intensities of wind and ambient sound, in dialogue with the machine’s technical configuration, gave rise to an ideogrammatic recording where natural forces contribute directly to the algorithmic shaping of image and sound. The videos presented in this gallery are traces of that encounter — more than representations, they are manifestations of a latent ancestral presence, made audible and visible through technical mediation.
Essay 2: Cabo do Mondego — Return to the Cliffs
The video recordings presented in this gallery capture the intensified interplay between wind data and robotic motion. As the camera responded to shifting air masses, new forms of machinic expressivity emerged. This setup does not merely register the environment, but opens space for the machine to enact its own rhythm — a dance of sensing, interpreting, and exceeding.
In this mediation experiment, the decision was made to incorporate the captured movements of a performer, thus opening a reflection on the presence of the human element as integrated within the landscape. The coexistence of body, machine, and environment accentuates the transductive nature of the experience, inviting us to conceive of the landscape as a relational and sensuous composition.
Through this process, the machine moves beyond its instrumental function and gestures toward poiesis: a writing of the landscape through contingent machinic agency.
Essay 3: Mondego Riverbank (Figueira da Foz)
Conducted along the northern bank of the Mondego River, this mediation explored the interstitial space between the riparian ecosystem and the machinic apparatus. The site, characterised by open airflows, water vegetation, and an abundance of bird calls, was chosen for its sonic and visual richness. The [v]IWM was positioned to capture both macro (panoramic) and micro (vegetal) perspectives through its dual-camera system.
The recordings presented here trace a dialogue between the vegetal rhythms stirred by wind and the panoramic visual field shaped by the river’s currents. These videos embody a (v)ideogrammatic inscription that articulates space and sound not as static representations, but as expressive unfoldings. They offer a glimpse into an expanded writing, one in which the landscape becomes a medium for encounter, transformation, and co-creation