What

Remains

JCode · 2026

I started this series on the first night of the strikes. I knew this was going to be an inflection point in the global order with long lasting implications regardless of the outcome. I sat down and started coding an abstraction algorithm in p5js. I felt these events were something that photography alone wasn't going to capture and felt the urge to find a different way for the viewer to witness it.

War photography saturates. You see the rubble, you recognise the formula, you scroll past. The human capacity to absorb atrocity through repeated exposure is not a feature; it is a defence mechanism, and a defence mechanism is a kind of numbness. I wanted a way to document these events that arrived at the viewer before their trained responses could intercept it.

The series was made day by day, in the order events happened. The sequence is the argument. What remains is the record.

Enter

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The Work

"It does not know whose rubble it is reading. It cannot choose sides. Its neutrality is not a limitation. It is the point."

What Remains · 2026

The title What Remains operates in three registers simultaneously. The first is formal: what the algorithm retains from each source photograph, stripped of its documentary context — the weight, the heat, the dispersal, the silence. The second is human: what remains of the lives, structures, and cities in these images after the camera has moved on and the news cycle has closed. The third is political: what remains of the international order that the United States spent the second half of the twentieth century constructing.

I believe this conflict will be read by history as a watershed — not primarily as a military event, but as the moment when the decline of American imperial power became visible and irreversible. What follows is not a return to stability. The Middle East that comes out of this conflict is one in which the regional architecture has been permanently altered: likely a more influential Iran, a more isolated United States, and a set of regional states that will necessarily build closer relationships with Tehran. The centre of gravity that was always moving east has now moved faster, and more definitively, toward China.

This is the historical moment the series is documenting. Not just the war, but what the war reveals about the order that preceded it and the order that will follow. I am not a war correspondent. I am someone who watches things happen and tries to find a form to share what I am watching.

Continue

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The Process

"What it produces is not interpretation. It is extraction. What the photograph contained. What remained."

JCode is a generative artist working at the intersection of code, paint, and political document. His practice explores how algorithmic systems translate lived experience into formal abstraction — and what is preserved, and what is lost, in that translation.

The algorithm does something very specific: it reads a photograph for colour, structure, energy, and edge data — and produces an abstract composition from what it finds. It has no cultural memory of war. It doesn't know what a bomb crater means; it knows what a bomb crater looks like, formally.

Each work is built in two layers. First a p5.js algorithm that extracts structure, colour and composition. Second, a custom LORA model trained on the artist's established mark-making vocabulary, gestural instincts, where marks land and how they relate. A photograph enters. The system reads it as pure formal data: colour temperature, compositional mass, directional energy. What emerges is not an illustration. It is a translation.

The abstract paintings in this series will outlast the news cycle, because abstraction ages differently than photography. A photograph of rubble dates. A painting of mass and colour and energy does not. Thirty years from now, these works will still carry what the algorithm found in each image — even if no one alive remembers what the image was.

The Works