Phil Shek
SCM City University of Hong Kong
The Ontological Investigation of Photography in the Age of A.I. Generative Images
WHEN PAINTING WAS BAPTIZED BY PHOTOGRAPHY, IT WAS REBORN.
WHEN PHOTOGRAPHY IS BAPTIZED BY AI GENERATIVE IMAGING, WHAT HAPPENS?
Painting Reborn
Once upon a time, photography made a shocking thunder strike that awakened most prominent painters. After the invention of photography, painters were no longer magicians able to convert human anticipation of verbal narrative into synthesized realistic images with the magic tricks of geometry because photographers could do a better job. More realistic images were produced in a more convenient and affordable way. This seemed like bad news for painters who spent their time polishing their skills in rendering the geometry of space, light, and texture. However, many of them realized that the thunder strike not only woke them from the comfortably numb sweet dream but also broke down the chains of geometric perspective they had worn for more than a hundred years. Painters were reborn. They found something more meaningful to do.
Photography is identified finally and perfectly.
Garry Winogrand once said, “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” This simple statement implies at least two things. On one hand, there is a discrepancy between what we see, what we want, what we can imagine, and the photographs produced by the camera, which always give us surprise or disappointment. We see at the very moment with our eyes open to the world, and we have an anticipation of the recorded image with the camera. No matter how carefully we try to predict, control, or manipulate the images, the photographic image will provide something extra. Most artists embrace the unexpected extra as a piece of crystal they find among millions of grains of sand on the beach. The facticity of the real world provides the building blocks for photographic images. Photographers and photo-artists try different ways to juggle these fragments from reality to constitute their works.
AI-generated images can create high-fidelity realism that no professional photographer could compare, at least in terms of speed and low cost. The AI images involve zero bits of light and shadow from the real world. They provide the best text-to-image solution for applications ranging from top-notch commercial imagery to nine-year-old YouTubers. Such text-to-image systems are so powerful because there is a huge database that enables the system to generate almost all possibilities that the prompt input could mean. The totality of meaning that human spoken language could possibly express is embedded in a fast-growing and self-learning system. The big question is: “What is left for us? What is left for photographic expression?” Returning to what I discussed in the beginning, it sounds like bad news, but it is not. We will figure it out.
In this investigation, I will go through the phenomena of the mechanics of AI images in relation to the application of photographs in order to come up with a new vision of a very old question: “WHAT IS PHOTOGRAPHY?”
BIO
Mr Phil Shek is a photographic artist who focuses on the documentary attribute. In his work he explores the potentials of the photo medium from traditional aesthetics to digital immersive technology. He is now an instructor of photography and visual communication in the School of Creative Media.
ARTWORK [7]
Louis Daguerre’s nightmare, No.1 to no. 5 , 2018
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SCM City University of Hong Kong
The Ontological Investigation of Photography in the Age of A.I. Generative Images
WHEN PAINTING WAS BAPTIZED BY PHOTOGRAPHY, IT WAS REBORN.
WHEN PHOTOGRAPHY IS BAPTIZED BY AI GENERATIVE IMAGING, WHAT HAPPENS?
Painting Reborn
Once upon a time, photography made a shocking thunder strike that awakened most prominent painters. After the invention of photography, painters were no longer magicians able to convert human anticipation of verbal narrative into synthesized realistic images with the magic tricks of geometry because photographers could do a better job. More realistic images were produced in a more convenient and affordable way. This seemed like bad news for painters who spent their time polishing their skills in rendering the geometry of space, light, and texture. However, many of them realized that the thunder strike not only woke them from the comfortably numb sweet dream but also broke down the chains of geometric perspective they had worn for more than a hundred years. Painters were reborn. They found something more meaningful to do.
Photography is identified finally and perfectly.
Garry Winogrand once said, “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” This simple statement implies at least two things. On one hand, there is a discrepancy between what we see, what we want, what we can imagine, and the photographs produced by the camera, which always give us surprise or disappointment. We see at the very moment with our eyes open to the world, and we have an anticipation of the recorded image with the camera. No matter how carefully we try to predict, control, or manipulate the images, the photographic image will provide something extra. Most artists embrace the unexpected extra as a piece of crystal they find among millions of grains of sand on the beach. The facticity of the real world provides the building blocks for photographic images. Photographers and photo-artists try different ways to juggle these fragments from reality to constitute their works.
AI-generated images can create high-fidelity realism that no professional photographer could compare, at least in terms of speed and low cost. The AI images involve zero bits of light and shadow from the real world. They provide the best text-to-image solution for applications ranging from top-notch commercial imagery to nine-year-old YouTubers. Such text-to-image systems are so powerful because there is a huge database that enables the system to generate almost all possibilities that the prompt input could mean. The totality of meaning that human spoken language could possibly express is embedded in a fast-growing and self-learning system. The big question is: “What is left for us? What is left for photographic expression?” Returning to what I discussed in the beginning, it sounds like bad news, but it is not. We will figure it out.
In this investigation, I will go through the phenomena of the mechanics of AI images in relation to the application of photographs in order to come up with a new vision of a very old question: “WHAT IS PHOTOGRAPHY?”
BIO
Mr Phil Shek is a photographic artist who focuses on the documentary attribute. In his work he explores the potentials of the photo medium from traditional aesthetics to digital immersive technology. He is now an instructor of photography and visual communication in the School of Creative Media.
ARTWORK [7]
Louis Daguerre’s nightmare, No.1 to no. 5 , 2018
<< previous | next >>