The Mould Series

The Mould is a part of Il Sun Moon’s ongoing Diaristic Project, an experimental archive of moving images that reconsiders the everyday as a site of atmospheric presence and perceptual drift. In this particular chapter, subtitled Mould, the work departs from traditional diaristic sequencing and enters a more generative process—one that is shaped not only by memory, but by the algorithmic reshaping of sensation.

Developed through a custom machine learning program created by the artist, The Mould operates through a cycle of fragmentation and regeneration. Rather than retaining the linear temporality of the original footage, the program isolates and reconfigures each movement, colour, and sound, distilling them into layered stills and sequences. These fragments are not used to narrate, but to evoke—preserving the sensation of a moment as it was felt, not as it was remembered.

What emerges is a series of abstract and continuous moving images, neither fully representational nor entirely detached from the real. The images seem to drift between visibility and disappearance, familiarity and estrangement. Through this process, The Mould captures the collective, affective qualities of atmosphere: how it spreads, accumulates, and lingers not only in space, but within us. It speaks to the way shared environments leave marks on perception—slow, quiet, and untraceable until re-formed. Therefore, it challenges the act of recording as documentation. It positions the diaristic not as an act of recall, but as an embodied method of sensing through image, of letting atmosphere seep into form. The result is a visual field that is both intimate and impersonal, a memory that belongs to no one, yet can be felt by many.