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.
📅 Date: Wednesday 13 November 2024
🕗 Time: 20.00 – 21.15 CET
📍 Location: The Hmm’s online livestream platform
🎟 Tickets: €5, available via Foam
Photography is…
“Photography is…” is a series of online events by Foam and The Hmm that delve into the ways in which internet culture permeates and alters the field of photography—expanding and extending it exponentially. How does our relationship with the photographic image shift and change to the internet’s cultural and technological developments? Designed for everyone curious about the medium’s evolution in the digital age and for anyone intrigued by the future of visual culture online. Join us as we examine photography’s changing face in our image-saturated world.
Upcoming events in the series
11 December 2024: Photography is… surreal
(Re)interpreting reality in photography
Speakers
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Simone C Niquille
Simone C Niquille is a designer and researcher who 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. She’ll be joining us to talk about her works Homeschool and Sorting Song, which make visible the protocols and data that shape the categorisation and digital representation of the world. Link
Gregory Eddi Jones
Gregory Eddi Jones is a post-photographic artist, writer, and publisher whose work is grounded in methods of appropriation and the re-authorship of existing photographic, literary, and aesthetic traditions. He’ll be joining us to speak about his project [49/23] which investigates the relationship between AI and the photographic image, emphasising how technological evolution is intrinsically part of ‘technical images’. Gregory writes that “today, text literally becomes the image, bringing about a paradigm shift in the ways in which it is now possible not only to create visual content but also to think about it.” Link
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 AIgenerated images combined with a memetic caption turn into immersive experiences. Link
