Imaging after Photography – The Brooklyn Rail

Imaging after Photography
Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University
January 23–May 9, 2026
Houston, TX

In the day by day rampage of civic and cultural life, synthetic intelligence looms stage proper. By act three, disaster threatens and shreds ontological certainty. In visible tradition, arguably, the impact has appeared considerably extra merciful, and AI appears a much less disruptive endeavor, the post-fact current a benign superimposition of previous and future.

Amidst this profound state of civic nervousness, Imaging After Photography surveys generative practices that dwell in a comfortable eager for the previous, a suspending of a future reckoning that the scholar Svetlana Boym phrases “restorative nostalgia,” which lingers in aesthetic givens. The present is a fascinating palliative that emphasizes the pure world, analysis into the archive, and the fetishization of “data sets,” and, implicitly, the parsing of information to substitute for the act of pictures itself. However future-forward its premise, it appears retroactive, recycling pictorial conventions and avoiding crucial confrontation. Chopping wooden with a laser cutter relatively than an axe produces a pile of logs, nonetheless.

The exhibition, an admirable dedication spearheaded by curator Alison Weaver, is elaborately put in in a partitioned radial configuration, encouraging trade between the person our bodies of labor. It appears like a spectacle of pedagogy, a pure historical past museum with the dazzle of the sport video arcade: the room is dimmed, and the photographs are backlit to evoke an entombed hypnosis of the display. It is Plato’s cave, in fact, and within the in style jargon of latest promotion, “immersive.”

The bravado of hyperbole appears to inevitably accompany the ambition of generative applied sciences. The exhibition catalogue notes that the work of Refik Anadol makes use of “the largest dataset of nature photography assembled for an artwork” and isn’t alone in asserting P. T. Barnum-esque swagger as promotion—the mantra of “scaling.” Meanwhile, Quantum Memories Nature Studies (2021) harvests a jillion panorama pictures for video projection: a techno pastoral and obscure picturesque, its watercolor prettiness chaperoned by rolling techno music to amplify its theater. The integrity of the unique particular person landscapes—endlessly detailed and unique and time-consuming—is neutralized and generic, the algorithm revoking expertise for an thought of the panorama, estranged from its supply. But most probably mine is a frayed sentimentality, a dungeon anachronism already molding.

The apocalypse of knowledge is, in fact, a day by day lament. In Completion 1.0 (2021), Gregory Chatonsky implements the archived pictures (fourteen million) publicly obtainable on ImageNet. The particular person pictures are seamlessly collaged with others they resemble, and the ensuing image is described audibly and with indifferent precision by a man-made voice. That these imaginary pictures are verbally articulated with readability and confidence suggests they’ve turn into truth. This certainly poses an intriguing rupture of a prevailing photographic dialectic of truth and fiction.

So, too, What Darwin Missed (2024) is a grid of pictures taken from Charles Darwin’s 1830–40s research of coral types, intermixed—with out identification—with Joan Fontcuberta’s pictures generated from his personal underwater exploration. A shell recreation of marine biology, some factual and a few generated, it unexpectedly jogged my memory of Donald Rumsfeld’s formulation of the “unknown unknown” (versus the “known unknown”), a spiral that diminishes our confidence within the human capacity to collect and course of the mysteries of the pure world. Happily, an precise and gorgeous species of black coral (1941) from the Houston Museum of Natural Science is included within the undertaking, a second of authenticity (or so it appears) and texture amidst the hardened floor of the display, assuaging, momentarily, our cognitive insecurity.