Research continuous
What is actually happening
Continuous investigation. Open sources, public APIs, satellite imagery, scientific literature. What is actually happening, and how do we know?
TAIFUNOME
An independent research and art project
observing what remains, and what emerges anew,
when human systems fail, shift, or withdraw.
There is a second way to read this page.
01 — Origin
The eye of a typhoon
TAIFUNOME comes from the Japanese 台風の目 (taifu no mé) — the eye of a typhoon. Around it, the storm. Inside it, an uncanny quiet.
The name is not a place but a position, and the work moves through three of them: watching the storm from outside it, going in after the one signal worth following, and settling at the eye to make something of what was found. Then another storm forms.
Observation inspires imagination.
Imagination drives observation.
02 — What it does
Three layers, one system
Artwork continuous
Findings become images
Not illustration of a conclusion, but a second way of thinking about the same evidence.
Curated Works later in time
Themes surface
Years of research and artwork accumulate. Themes surface. Some become books.
The first is Feral Bestiary — a record of life at the boundary of human control. It is not planned. It is grown.
03 — Method
Evidence, inference, and invention are not the same thing
Every piece separates three layers, and says which is which.
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Fact
What happened. Sources required.
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Inference
What existing research suggests may follow. Marked as possibility.
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Invention
Artistic interpretation. Kept visibly distinct.
Work that claims something about a specific event carries open-source verification: provenance, corroboration, geolocation. Work that argues about a structure carries citations instead — studies, statistics, industry data. The claim decides the method, not the mood.
Sanitising is itself an edit.
Death is not removed from the frame because it is uncomfortable. The test is simple: is it there because it happened, or because it works?
04 — First Plate
Plate 001
Feral Bestiary — Tales of Return, Plate 001
A chihuahua carrying a deer leg through a landscape people have left.
The collar is the only warm colour in the frame, and the only evidence that this animal once belonged to someone. The camera sits at the dog’s shoulder, not above it. Human structures remain; humans do not.
None of that is incidental. The series’ visual language exists as a written specification — colour policy, lighting, composition, and a perception model for each species — and this plate is the worked demonstration of it. The same document drives the platform’s prompt-composition code, so the benchmark and the generator read from one source.
It was made by hand, ahead of the pipeline: manual sourcing, sketching, then generative passes driven from those drawings, then drawn over again. It is the target the automation is being built to reach, not something it produced. Establishing the human baseline first is what makes the automated result measurable.
05 — Recent Work
What the pipeline is making now
Plate 001 was made by hand as the target. These came out of the machine built to reach it — each one starting from a disaster record, an animal actually observed near it, and a prompt you can read.
06 — Scope
Animals first. Not animals only.
The work begins with animals under disaster, conflict, and human pressure — displaced pets, abandoned livestock, wildlife, forced migration. It will extend to ecology, environment, plants, history, architecture, culture, economy, and society.
The subject changes. The method does not: collect evidence, find the structure, show it clearly.
How should we regard animals — displaced pets, livestock, wildlife — when they are stripped of the categories that usually decide how much empathy they get?
As the project widens, the shape of the question holds: what is made invisible by the categories we use, and what becomes visible when they are removed?
07 — Status
Where this is now
The platform exists: an ingestion pipeline over public disaster and biodiversity APIs, a dashboard with synchronised map and timeline, a staged operator console that keeps a human in each phase rather than automating the judgement away, and a fact-checking module that returns “unverified” rather than assuming a claim holds.
- 01
- plate finished
- 06
- themes researched and waiting
- 00
- investigations published
The first published investigation is not out yet.