The National Average

The National Average is a 96-second generative moving-image work that asks what it means to computationally average a nation. Using a corpus of national and quasi-national flags, the work constructs an accelerating volumetric world from PCA/eigenflag representations, Stable Diffusion VAE latents, CLIP embeddings, statistical weightings, and intermediate computational artefacts. A camera pursues a continuously changing barycentric centre that recedes as the conditions of averaging change. Equal contribution, population, GDP, annual CO₂, and cumulative historical CO₂ produce incompatible results from the same corpus. The work develops the method of critical averaging: treating selection, representation, weighting, normalisation, and synthesis as consequential political and computational operations rather than neutral preliminaries. Agency is consequently distributed across the artist, datasets, statistical institutions, representational spaces, model architectures, training corpora, and pretrained checkpoints. The system can calculate and render an average, but it cannot justify why any particular average should represent the world.