Exploring text as an image-making technique.

From typing in an image search query to inadvertently helping train machine learning algorithms by 'selecting all images with traffic lights', text can be seen as the internet’s middleman. Whether it's captions underneath social media posts or textual metadata in online image archives, our relationship with images online is largely mediated through words. Machine learning algorithms are trained on large datasets of text-labeled photographs and with the recent rise of AI image generating tools, a photorealistic image can be created online through a simple textual prompt.  

What do these fast-paced developments in image-making techniques—when text literally becomes the image—mean to the photographic landscape? How are AI systems codifying large datasets of photographs through text? And how does textual bias in large language models influence image outcomes and the visual landscape as a whole? Photography is... text explores the impact of text on our understanding of photography online.   

Speakers

Simone C Niquille: Simone C Niquille is a designer and researcher. Through technoflesh Studio she produces films and writing that investigate computation as the new optics. Her work is concerned with vision technologies, the images they make and the worlds they create - from computer vision, 3d animation, computational photography to synthetic training datasets. Her work advocates for non-binary technology and against machine learning as a tool to validate and instrumentalize assumptions and reduce reality. 

Gregory Eddi Jones: Gregory Eddi Jones is a post-photographic artist, writer, and publisher based between Philadelphia and New York. Jones' work is grounded in methods of appropriation and the re-authorship of existing photographic, literary, and aesthetic traditions. His practice often engages with visual criticism, dark humor, cultural commentary, and building conversant bridges between past and present cultural, political, and technological conditions. 

Idil Galip: Idil Galip is a lecturer in new media and digital culture at the University of Amsterdam. She studies internet memes and runs the Meme Studies Research Network. She will talk about images and photos as a form of communication, focusing on a trend where AI-generated images combined with a memetic caption turn into immersive experiences.

What can the past tell us about photography's future?

Building on photography’s inherent reflective nature, sometimes it's worth 'looking backward to the future'—to examine our past as a way to look ahead. In the first event of the Photography is… series, we will take stock of the current landscape of photography by reflecting on the ways in which internet culture has shaped photography in the past 30 years.

The entanglements between the internet and the photographic image have led us to question what is even considered a photograph and to redefine how photographic images are created, consumed, and communicated online. During this event, we'll return to Foam Magazine #29: Curating the Future—an issue dedicated to envisioning the future of the medium. At that time, nearly thirteen years ago, the introduction stated that “the digitalisation of the medium brought about fundamental changes that have redetermined our entire visual culture, utterly transforming what we consider to be a photo".

What should photography have been like today, according to the past? Which topics and questions do we return to repeatedly when thinking about the internet's impact on photography? Which questions are still left unanswered? Together with a handful of the original contributors to the issue, we will peek back into the past to reflect on what has occurred since to speculate what might come.

Speakers

Fred Ritchin: Dean Emeritus of the International Center of Photography School. Author of four books on photography. His newest book, The Synthetic Eye, is forthcoming in 2024.

Constant Dullaart: Artist, director Distant.Gallery and professor Networked Materialities at ADBK-Nürnberg.

Marisa Olson: Artist, writer and curator.