Images Reimagined: AI Meets Photography on the Moody Center — Blind Journal

At Rice University in Houston, the Moody Center for the Arts hosts an exhibition that includes seven modern artists who reply to the ever-changing affect of synthetic intelligence (AI) via images. Prompting viewers with an essential query, “What is authentic, what is possible, and what are the issues at stake?”

“Imaging After Photography” options the works of Nouf Aljowaysir, Refik Anadol, Grégory Chatonsky, Sofia Crespo, Joan Fontcuberta, Lisa Oppenheim, and Trevor Paglen. Together, their work examines issues corresponding to hidden biases in knowledge and algorithms, and the way digital instruments can each reveal and deform actuality.

The exhibition is guided by the curatorial imaginative and prescient of Alison Weaver, Suzanne Deal Booth Executive Director, and Noor Alé, Associate Curator. Curator Alison Weaver says, “We wanted to bring seven international artists who we think are thoughtful in this space and present their current projects… with that hope of fostering conversation.”

That dialog begins the second a customer steps inside.

The exhibition opens with the work of Trevor Paglen, an American artist and geographer, spanning from 2016 to 2022. Paglen’s work facilities on the expertise that quietly runs individuals’s lives, corresponding to facial recognition software program and AI picture processing, that most individuals by no means see or take into consideration. His objective is to drag again the curtain on these methods and present how they work, how they are often flawed or biased.

He makes use of AI to construct digital portraits from pure knowledge, rework nature images via machine imaginative and prescient, and create interactive items that present guests how a pc would label and categorize their faces. Through these works, he exhibits that the way in which machines “see” the world displays the assumptions and biases of the info they had been skilled on.

Upon getting into the oasis of datasets, guests are surrounded by floating partitions, every displaying the artists’ work. Refik Anadol, a pioneering artist and technologist, exhibits what AI can create when it’s used as a artistic collaborator. His work “Quantum Memories Nature Studies” (2021) pulls over 200 million nature photographs from the web and runs them via AI and quantum computing to supply a large, ever-shifting dreamscape of landscapes.

That sense of pure abundance takes a quieter, extra intimate type within the work of Sofía Crespo. The Argentinian artist creates work exploring the relationships amongst nature, biology, and expertise. Her collection, “Temporally Uncaptured” (2023–2024), drew inspiration from Anna Atkins, the Nineteenth-century botanist, and her e-book Photographs of British Algae (1843).

Crespo fed Atkins’ historic cyanotypes into her personal AI to generate new photographs of pure varieties, then printed every body by hand utilizing the identical cyanotype technique. Those prints turned the frames of quick movies taking part in close by. “For me, I use AI as a way of showing how incomplete the data sets we currently have about the natural world are,” Crespo says, “And how we are potentially losing biodiversity because of AI.”

The nearly invisible adjustments that occur in nature, the moments that cross so rapidly they’re almost unattainable to seize, and the way each the human eye and expertise strive, and typically fail, to catch them. “Everything is just happening so quickly; if I blink, it’s already something happening,” says Crespo.

The nervousness of the fleeting, of what escapes the report completely, carries into the adjoining work of Lisa Oppenheim — although right here, the topic shouldn’t be what’s vanishing however what has already vanished.

Lisa Oppenheim, an American multimedia artist, connects the unseen previous and reimagines it with in the present day’s expertise in her challenge “Mons Steichen” (2024–2025). She centered on a uncommon iris known as Monsieur Steichen, a range created in 1910 as a tribute to photographer Edward Steichen. Since nobody is aware of what it seemed like, Oppenheim used AI to think about it, feeding the algorithm photographs of the flower’s father or mother crops to generate speculative variations of what it may need been.

She printed these AI-generated flowers utilizing the identical dye-transfer course of Edward Steichen himself used within the Thirties, including her personal shade selections. Merging historic method with trendy expertise to reconstruct what’s misplaced and to ask what may have been. She designed material panels for the area, drawing on Steichen’s unused 1927 textile designs and reimagining them via her personal imaginative and prescient.

Oppenheim’s reconstruction raises questions concerning the limits of the archive; Joan Fontcuberta pushes these limits additional, into the realm of deliberate fabrication. The Spanish conceptual artist and photographer, combines his images with AI-generated photographs of coral reefs. In his challenge, “What Darwin Missed” (2024), he asks: “What if Darwin had discovered coral species that never actually existed?”

Fontcuberta traveled to the Galápagos and created a collection of photographs that blend actual images with AI-generated ones. By making reality and fiction look equivalent, he needs us to cease and suppose: simply because one thing appears like a photograph doesn’t imply it’s actual. And simply because science or a digital camera exhibits us one thing doesn’t imply it’s the entire image.

“Today, we wonder if we are still capable of distinguishing reality from its representation,” says Fontcuberta. “Perhaps the disorientation we feel today stems precisely from this: we live in a world where shadows are high-resolution and where a copy of a copy can seem more convincing than any supposed original.”

If Fontcuberta questions what we see, Nouf Aljowaysir interrogates who has at all times been doing the seeing — and whose gaze has been unnoticed of the body. The artist examines id, household historical past, and the way AI inherits previous biases. Her set up makes use of two units of historic images, one from British explorer Gertrude Bell, who documented the Middle East within the early 1900s, and one from the Getty Museum’s archive of colonial-era images of the area.

“Predominantly, the pictures of the past are from a colonial perspective…” says Aljowaysir. “The data is biased, and the internet doesn’t preserve personal, intimate histories from local perspectives.”

When she ran these photographs via AI fashions, the outcomes had been telling; the algorithms mislabeled and flattened the individuals in them.

She then digitally erased the human figures from the colonial images and used these “empty” photographs to coach a brand new AI, producing her personal collection of works. Her work asks whose tales get informed, whose get erased, and the way these erasures carry ahead into the machines we construct in the present day. “The biggest thing this project taught me is how human biases get encoded into these systems, and how that affects the way we understand history, culture, and even ourselves,” says Aljowaysir.

The exhibition closes on a be aware that’s directly probably the most summary and probably the most self-referential. Where the opposite artists use AI as a instrument for excavation or hypothesis, Grégory Chatonsky turns it right into a mirror.

French-Canadian artist Grégory Chatonsky’s video set up Completion 1.0 makes use of AI to blur the road between what’s actual and what’s fabricated. Two screens play aspect by aspect, one scrolling via hundreds of thousands of actual photographs used to coach AI fashions, the opposite exhibiting crops, animals, and objects continuously morphing into new, imaginary varieties generated by AI. “Behind these judgements lies a blind spot we rarely look at directly: our own capacity to exist, to think, to feel. I hope this work creates the conditions for the audience to turn towards that blind spot — and linger there for a moment.”

An artificial voice narrates the entire thing, skilled on artwork criticism texts and imitating an artwork critic. Sometimes making sense, typically not. “During the creation process, there were genuinely unsettling moments…the moments when it said something accurate, precise, almost elegant. Something I would have wanted to formulate myself. It is in those instants that a real discomfort sets in — not towards the machine, but towards oneself,” says Chatonsky.

It is a discomfort the exhibition as an entire appears designed to impress — not as a warning, however as an invite to suppose extra fastidiously. As Alice Weaver places it, “It is unknown where the AI technologies will lead us, but we feel it’s important to talk about it…to bring people now to discuss what’s happening, how do we grapple with it?” In reality, “Imaging After Photography” challenges what viewers assume is actual and invitations them to query and surprise on the work earlier than them, within the rising levels of AI.

“Imaging After Photography” is on view till May 9, 2026 on the Moody Center for The Arts in Houston.