100 Locations

About this project

This project explores how to re-connect to a place one feels almost too familiar with after living there for nearly two decades. The seemingly familiar is often the hardest to explore, as it hides in plain sight. In The Lottery of Forgotten Dreams – Topographies of the Unseen I re-encounter Saigon, my home for most of my adult life, using photography, conceptual and algorithmic art alongside local custom.

It starts with a number. Numerology is deeply embedded in Vietnamese society. Lottery is omnipresent, with tickets sold on almost every corner. Played on top of it is số đề, a second game rooted in ancient mythology: the last two digits of a ticket name a legendary creature (repeated after 40), and those who win gain not only earthly fortune but a connection to the spiritual world.

A small Python script turns a photographed ticket's six-digit number into a fixed coordinate within Saigon; the same number always produces the same point. I visited the 100 places the numbers led me to and photographed each. It is a game, and its rules can be rewritten.

Each site photograph is then combined with an AI-generated image of the creature named by the last two digits, drawn from a library of 4,000 I created based on Albrecht Dürer's drawings. The composite is run through Processing: pixelated and rotated in three dimensions, with colour and geometry derived from the ticket number, resulting in often abstract images that show the overlap of the real and the spiritual world.