Wandering
The Archive
A new form of interacting with historical image material — inspired by Walter Benjamin's ideas of Erkenntnisblitz and Flânerie, merged with the possibilities of high-dimensional embedding spaces.
The Archive
Embedding Editor
Shape your journey through the archive with intuitive tools that let you manipulate the underlying embedding space.
XY Fader
Navigate the embedding space intuitively by dragging in two dimensions.
Navigating High-Dimensional Space
Each image in the archive exists as a point in a 256-dimensional embedding space — a mathematical representation of its visual and semantic content.
Through Principal Component Analysis (PCA), we compress these 256 dimensions into a navigable 2D space, preserving the relationships between images while making them visually explorable.
Similar images cluster together, forming neighborhoods of visual meaning. As you wander through this space, you encounter unexpected connections — the Erkenntnisblitz that Benjamin described.