Ever since the invention of photography, technologically produced images have dazzled us. Often, it has fallen to visual artists to critically assess the social and cultural impact of these images. One of the main issues that piqued their interest was the way this constant stream of ever new technologies redefined the relationship between the apparatus and its human operator. What does it mean to be relegated to the somewhat passive position of someone merely activating a process that for the most part runs its own course? Their attempts to explore the programmatic nature of these apparatuses has become even more necessary today as we are being confronted with powerful systems that seemingly conjure up images out of thin air. Considering that these apparatuses are supposed to function as technological enhancements (or should we say: replacements?) of our human faculties of thinking and imagining, we’re left with the urgent question how to deal with this alien intelligence. Are we supposed to play with or against these apparatuses? What remains of the human experience in the datasets they produce and what is left out? Is it possible to equate the flexibility of AI models that dynamically adjust their internal rules based on input data to our own human capacity of invention? Are they really able to free us from our all-too-human expectations and, in doing so, open up new avenues for our imagination? If so, what would be required to unleash their potential to surprise us? Does it emerge in the glitches that appear when they are pushed beyond their limits? Or does it only appear when their virtual data are translated in a material form and run up against the friction of the material world? These are only some of the questions that the invited speakers will address in their talks during the conference.

 

The symposium will take place at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp at De Lange Zaal

 

Schedule

 

10.00            Introduction Steven Humblet

10.15-10.50    Franziska Kunze

10.50-11.30    Emmanuel Van der Auwera

11.30-11.45    Short break

11.45-12.30    Spiros Hadjidjanos

12.30-13.30    Lunch Break

13.30-14.15    Michael Reisch

14.20-15.00   Susan Morris

15.00-15.15    Short break

15.15-16.00    Mona Hedayati

16.00-16.45   Jeff Weber

 

Franziska Kunze

Bugging the System. …Or Sticking to the Idea of “A Realistic Representation”. Whatever That Means.

 

What does a stuck fly have to do with glitches? Or a moth that got lost on its exploratory flight? Are glitches strictly electronic in nature or is it worth looking back a little further? In her presentation, Franziska Kunze will trace the origins of technical glitches back to the beginnings of analogue photography and, thereby, highlighting both intentional and unintentional results. On that basis, she will discuss how moments of disruption took their course as an artistic counter-movement to recognised forms of expression via analogue photography, video and sound art to early digital and current AI-based image media, where glitches are intentionally provoked or deliberately programmed.

 

Dr Franziska Kunze (*1984 Rostock, GDR/Germany) is chief curator of photography and time-based media at Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich where she curated the exhibition “Glitch. The Art of Interference” in 2023. Franziska takes on teaching assignments, writes texts and is involved in various expert juries on photography.

 

Emmanuel Van der Auwera

White Cloud

 

The presentation will show the AI created film White Cloud followed by a Q&A with the artist.

 

In a remote industrial site in Inner Mongolia, miners extract a strategic resource essential to our way of life under dramatic human and environmental conditions. This is where 80% of rare earth minerals, essential to the manufacture of digital technologies, come from. A miner working on the site shares his thoughts on his life and working conditions. White Cloud is a film developed with generative AI that offers a unique perspective on the Bayan Obo mining district. While questions of geopolitics, ecology, capitalism, conspiracy and future scenarios run through the film, the essence is the testimony of a lone miner in search of a better future. The miner’s voice is AI-generated, while his thoughts are actual pieces of text messages and statements from a real miner in the Bayan Obo mining district, taken from the Douyin app (the Chinese version of Tik Tok).

 

Emmanuel Van der Auwera is a 2015 laureate of the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (HISK) post-academic course in Ghent (BE), a 2015 Langui Award recipient of the Young Belgian Art Prize, and the first winner of the Goldwasserschenking awarded by WIELS and the Belgian Royal Museums of Fine Arts (BE). In 2021, he was a participant in the Nasher Prize Dialogues with Jacolby Satterwhite, Mika Rottenberg, Alice Rawsthorn and Randy Kennedy.

 

Spiros Hadjidjanos

Virtual Matter: Metamaterialisations of Computational Processes

 

We find ourselves in a transformative era, shifting from traditional algorithms to powerful AI tools. As generative image technologies shape politics and thought, it becomes vital to analyze and critically question the mechanisms behind them. Neural networks, processing data at levels beyond human understanding, resonate with Deleuze’s concept of Difference, functioning as contingent, rhizomatic systems filled with unrealized possibilities. Does this not suggest a certain level of agency within these networks, allowing them to shape their creative processes in unpredictable directions? Generative AI, inherently non-reproducible, unveils a vast conceptual space, much like Flusser’s notion of the camera program. Can generative AI truly innovate and surpass human creativity? What can we learn by assembling dialectical relationships between AI and digitally fabricated works, to examine their distinctions? Is there a dichotomy between static and dynamic thought in technologically mediated art, analogous to the contrast between handcrafted works and automated fabrication? Should the recent trajectory of digital technology hint at a future where AI-driven works lead to tangible breakthroughs, similar to earlier digital innovations? And how might we shape the tools of dataset politics?

 

Spiros Hadjidjanos, born in 1978, in Athens, Greece is a visual artist who lives and works in Berlin. Hadjidjanos studied with a DAAD scholarship at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) where he was awarded the Meisterschülerpreis des Präsidenten. His work spans across different media and is informed by his critical reflection on technological processes and his personal biography. He has created set-design for theaters in Germany and has exhibited his work widely in galleries and institutions. Currently, he is a researcher in AI within the Thinking Tools Research Group at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp

 

Michael Reisch

Photogenetic

 

Visual artist Michael Reisch has been exploring the relationship between photography and digitality since the early 1990s. In a lecture, he will explain his experimental, generative working process, in which photography, digital image editing, 3D printing, video, artificial intelligence and other digital tools are used. He will reflect on his artistic and aesthetic decisions against the backdrop of technological change, with particular reference to the phenomena of Photoshop, networked conditions and artificial intelligence with regard to the photographic.

 

# TheTechnicalImage Photogenetic PhotographyBased Process EnvironmentDelimitation TheVirtual RealismCrisis Agency Representation TheGenerative UltimateAutonomy Generic QuasiPhotographic Versioning TheMachine Apparatus Control Automatic ProvocingTheAlgorithm Nature PostNatural InfiniteReversibility DigitalIdeologies TechnoSphere HumanMachineInteraction BodyDisLocation EntropyExtropyBelief PostDeathCore PostHuman HyperAcceleration Potential DigitalDeformation Critique System Speculation ArtificialIntelligenceMindSet DecisionDelegation TheSynthetic VirtualRealityReference PhysicalRealityReference Form Presence PhysicalBody ShapingDesigning Materialisation Transformation UlimateGlitch RealLifeExperience TheBodyAndTheVirtualProblem MaterialImmaterial Artificiality RealFakeMaterial Construction Contextualisation AuthorityOfPhotography PostFactual AuthenticityTrashCore Ideology Truth PostTruth Fake Meaning CrisisOfMeaning Illusion Hallucination FullImmersion Immaterialism MachineVision HumanPerception HumanAuthorship Subjectivity TheArtist InternalImages Resonance Memory Imagination SubliminalHysteria Individual Self Subject “MURRAY, DONDIE, REBECCA”

 

Michael Reisch (b. 1964) is a German artist and photographer. His work combines aspects of photography and sculpture with new digital imaging tools such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality, 3D scanning, video, 3D printing, etc. He studied at the Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and currently teaches as Professor for Photography and Digital Media at the Alanus-Hochschule, Bonn-Alfter, Germany. Michael Reisch is the initiator and head of darktaxa-project, a platform for artists working experimentally at the interface of photography and new digital imaging techniques. He lives and works in Düsseldorf.

 

Susan Morris

Camera Consciousness

 

In an essay written for Camera Obscura in 1990, Ann Banfield described ways in which new types of written, novelistic, sentences that she describes as ‘unspeakable’, started to emerge after the invention of photography. This discovery had a radical impact on my own writing and led directly to a shift in my practice. I moved away from reading psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity to analyses of literature in relation to concurrent technological developments, particularly in Woolf’s 1931 book The Waves. Instead of working with straight photography, video and film — the problem of it ‘always representing’ — I started to make work which frequently employs rules or constraints in tandem with digital technology, such as body-worn tracking devices. The material recorded using these devices is then directly translated into colored thread to produce large-scale Jacquard tapestries or mapped out as co-ordinates in space and output as line drawings on large rolls of inkjet paper. More recently, I have moved into working with ambient sound and light recordings that are also developed into tapestries or inkjet prints, alongside making short recordings of everyday life using my iPhone – a diaristic practice that has taken me back to the moving image, but that works against narrative to describe instead Woolf’s idea of a ‘world without a self’ originally encountered in —and arguably produced by — early, analogue, photography.

 

Susan Morris is an artist who also writes. Her PhD, On the Blank, UAL, 2007, examined the relation between writing, photography and drawing. Morris has won several grants and awards including, in 2020, a competition to make a series of large Jacquard tapestries for the New Library and Study Centre at St John’s College, University of Oxford, work she completed in 2021. Morris is currently working on her second large-scale written piece, an ‘involuntary novel’ made using the app Evernote as a counterpoint to her visual work that has been described as ‘involuntary drawing’. Morris lives and works in London, UK.

 

Mona Hedayati

Technical pipelines as Agents: Reconfiguring the Self-Other Paradigm

 

The intersection of data and body is a curious one that while navigating the rupture between the mess of biological processes made felt as embodied experience and quantification of such processes as data opens up more questions than answers. At stakes are emergent events arising from the micro materiality of the body as it is segmented as a repository of data for analysis, extrapolation, and declarative meaning making. This urge for quantification is well captured vis-à-vis ‘self and other tracking’ as an exemplary manifestation of this intersection, leveraging the classic data pipeline of collection, processing, and interfacing to make emotional meaning out of such metrics. The talk discusses performance as a form of body-based exploration augmented by hardware and software orchestration to pull layers of neurophysiological imprints as data from the body and across events using biosensors as an apparatus of capture. Techno and bio feedback loops are thus mobilized to externalize the internal neurophysiological rhythms, given that while technical pipelines fail to deduce emotional interpretability out of neurophysiological data, subverting their pragmatic logic can open up a capacity for ‘affective attunement.’ Such augmentations can thus tap into difficult experiences such as migration and exile that due to their transformative quality have been deemed ‘non-negotiably subjectified.’ Data-responsive moving images and sonification are pathways to this affective attunement that showcase the interplay between the sensory body, sensing machines, and making sense of their intersection.

 

Mona Hedayati is an artist-researcher and a joint PhD candidate between Canada and Belgium. She has an MFA in digital media and an advanced master’s in social-political art and design. Hedayati’s work has been disseminated internationally not only at white cube gallery spaces, festivals, conferences and artist-run centers but also at scientific and technological institutions given the hybrid nature of her work. As an educator, Hedayati teaches courses at MA and Master of Research level on the intersection of theory and practice.

 

 

Jeff Weber

Untitled (Neural Networks) – An unsentimental consideration of AI

 

I would like to reflect on the role of A.I. and its technical implications as an infra-structure in the constitution of today’s networked image regimes, and (in relation to that) on the idea of A.I. as the exteriorization of a cognitive instance. My proposition deviates from the current dominant narrative, with its emotional biases, mystifications and the perpetual assessment of generative A.I., and instead stresses a more detached and analytical approach, taking into account the epistemological provenance of some of the main ideas and principles that determine the field of A.I. as deriving within the field of neuroscience. I think of the intersection of these two fields (A.I. & neuroscience) as profoundly pertinent to the understanding of how images operate today. In the light of the symposium, I intend to draw on the relevance of ideas of serial order and serialization to neuroscience and A.I., as these have been a model within my own practice with photography and film since 2008. Serialization, in data sciences (and A.I.), applies to the operation of transforming complex data structures into strings (or: one dimensional arrays) for signal processing purposes. Serial Order refers to one of the central questions in cognitive neuroscience, as to the manner in which the position of an item within a sequence is encoded in the brain.

 

Jeff Weber lives and works in New York. He is the founder of the Kunsthalle Leipzig, a conceptual project in the form of an institution he established in 2012 as an extension of his photographic and filmic practice. The subsequent work in the form of a book An Attempt at a Personal Epistemology / Kunsthalle Leipzigwas published by Roma Publications, Amsterdam and presented at KW Berlin in 2018. Weber earned his MFA from the La Cambre art school in Brussels (2010) and was an artist-in-residence at Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (2011-2012).