Tobias Stenberg

2026

Seed / Shore

Seed / Shore is a three-minute video in which a montage of the praying mantis’ anatomy unfolds at a tempo governed by the sea.

The imagery consists of fragments of the mantis’ body: joints, segments, claws, and head. The anatomy does not appear as a stable figure but as a series of shifts, where body parts slide in and out of one another. The mantis therefore does not appear as a single animal, but as a montage, a body that is continuously assembled and dissolved again.

The tempo of the montage is controlled by an external oscillator: The sea.

The soundtrack is a field recording of waves, recorded close to the shoreline. The amplitude of the sea is continuously analysed and translated directly into the rhythm of the video. The higher the waves, the faster the images change. At the same time, the amplitude also affects the persistence of the image: when the waves grow stronger, individual frames begin to echo into the following frame, creating brief overlaps between images.

In this way, the sea becomes the rhythmic engine of the montage. The tempo of the video does not arise from within the image itself, but from outside it.

The recording of the sea was made by the artist at the coastline near the place where a psychiatric diagnosis was first given. The hospital where the diagnosis was made no longer exists today. The site therefore remains both a concrete geographical location and a displaced point of origin.

In this sense, the work can be understood as an investigation of the mantis’ anatomy and origin through a perceptual displacement: a human experience translated into a rhythmic relation between sea, image, and body.

A central element of the work is the use of a seed.

The video sequence is generated from a four-digit seed directly derived from the geographic coordinates of the place where the recording of the sea was made. The exact coordinates are also embedded in the metadata of the video. The generative starting point of the work is therefore tied to a specific location.

However, the seed can also be understood in its literal sense: As a seed.

In that sense, it points back to the place where the diagnosis was first given. The coordinate functions both as a technical parameter and as a point of origin — a number that is also a place, a place that is also a seed.

In Seed / Shore, the movement of the sea, the anatomy of the mantis, and this point in the landscape are bound together within a single generative structure, where rhythm, image, and place emerge from the same origin.

Part of the ongoing project Pickles and other machines