Paradox Post-Photography /2023

We humans have a widely shared understanding of the borders of physics and life teaches us what is possible and what not. An algorithm, in contrast, cannot share a life with us and stays blind to our experiences independent of how many sensors it captures. An algorithm does not know, e.g. how an explosion in space looks like, neither do we.
Paradox Post-Photography exploits this gap to explore unthinkable aesthetics. The guiding question is: what image would an algorithm create if there is no meaningful way to interprete the prompt? How does an algorithm “react” if it is forced to visualize pure non-sense? The result is an exploration of truly novel machine-aesthetics in the absence of a guiding mind. The images allow a glimpse into the machine: the unavoidable errors allow you to approach the pure mechanic of AI lost in its latent space. These works are also a time document about image generation with AI. These experiments will only be possible for a short window in time, before all image outputs will look beautiful and meaningful.
Most works are monochrome and deliberately imitate the aesthetics of historic images. In a time, where everyone is obsessed with the threat of fake news, I want to shed light on the much more profound danger: fake history. Only by means of older knowledge and historic images we can understand the world and judge new inputs as coherent or misleading. AI companies currently work on destroying historic sources during their training processes for LLMs. Once the original images are gone, it would be too easy to produce fake historic images, which make misleading fake news appear totally coherent.
From a personal point of view, Paradox Post-Photography represents my journey towards my own visual language. I started with the absolute basics: What is light? What is matter? What is movement? Later I went on to explore concrete motifs, sometimes vague, sometimes bold – all wrapped in fake historic aesthetics; to playfully navigate between pure potentials and parrallel perceptions.
Most works have been crated with Stable Diffiusion (model versions 0.9 to Flux) starting July 2023. They were selected from thousands of generations, and they show my journey from pure abstract randomness to heavy symbolism. Though these monochrome works are very different from what I am doing now, they are crucial to explain how I got there.
Here is a link to my Paradox Post-Photography Archive.