Thursday 16th April:

Storyhouse Cinema, Chester, CH1 2AR

 

10.00              Victor Burgin, Adaptation (2023), digital video loop, 12m 32s

 

10.30              Keynote: Professor Victor Burgin, What is an author? The artist in the age of AI. (Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton) Illustrated Talk 

 

14.30              Professor Victor Burgin - Seminar (20 participants by invitation)

 

Victor Burgin is an artist and writer. The most recent solo exhibition of his still and moving image work – Ça – took place at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, in 2024. His most recent books, Formes d’idéologie : écrits sur l’image (Milan, Mimesis), and Returning to Benjamin II: the Age of AI (London, MACK) were published in 2025. Burgin is Professor Emeritus of History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz; Emeritus Millard Chair of Fine Art, Goldsmiths College, University of London; and Professor of Visual Culture, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. 

                        

 

Friday 17th April:

Exton Park Campus, University of Chester, School of Education, CSE018/114 (Auditorium and Mezzanine), CH1 4BJ

 

09.30               Registration (Tea and Coffee)

 

10.00               Welcome and Introduction

 

Session 1       Chair: Dr Cian Quayle (University of Chester)

 

10.15               Dr Tracy Piper Wright (University of Chester): Trusting the process: long term daily photography and the evolving photographic self

 

10.45               Holly Birtles (University of Brighton): Fighting Fish, AI into Dark Room, Chennai Rivers

 

11.15               Dr Peter Ainsworth (London College of Communication - UAL): Photorealism and the Voice of Non-Conscious Imaging Systems

 

11.45               Dr Paul Jones (Nottingham Trent University): Strange Strangers: Artistic Agency, Generative AI, and the Analogue Ground

 

12.15               Chair: Speaker Plenary / Summary Remarks

 

12.30               Lunch

 

 

Session 2        Chair: Professor Erik Knudsen

 

13.30               Professor Martin Newth (The Glasgow School of Art): Event Horizons – between Image, Material and Machine

 

14.00               India Lawton (Southampton Solent University): Prompting as Gesture: Authorship, Trust, and Photography in an Age of AI

 

14.30               Fergus Heron (University of Brighton): Photography, Technologies and Different Natures

 

15.00               Guy Mayman (Wrexham University): [DATAMOSH performance] VAPE DREAM: Images from the Infected Archive          

 

15.30               Chair: Speaker Plenary / Summary Remarks

 

 

16.00               Exhibition / Drinks Reception: Senate House, Exton Park Campus, University of Chester (TBC)

                        

19.00               Hang-Out TBC

 

 

 

Saturday 18th April:

Exton Park Campus, University of Chester, School of Education, CSE018/114 (Auditorium and Mezzanine), CH1 4BJ

 

10.00               Welcome and Introduction

 

Session 3        Chair: Dr Alexandru Modoi

 

10.15               Neuza Morais (University of Chester): not nor

 

10.45               Kypros Kyprianou (Newcastle University) (TBC): One Eye Good, Two Eyes Better: Navigating the Indexical Mirage of Machine Stereoscopy

 

11.15               Nam Huh (Loughborough University): Relational Trust and Post-Photographic Practice in an Age of AI: The Case of Tzusoo

 

11.45               Alberto Gonzalez (University of Chester): Prompting Chance: Can AI Reproduce Human-based Photographic Unpredictability?

 

Brunch Break

 

 

12.45               Emery C. Walshe: Phantasms of Reality: Material Dialogues in the Age of Digital Disillusionment

 

13.15               Stephen Clarke and Tom Hignett (University of Chester): In Full Colour: Memories of Seaside Holidays

 

                        

Chair: Speaker Plenary / CQ & AM Closing Remarks

 

END

The following is a summary of the Chester Photo Festival Committee’s preliminary thoughts in response to the following question:

 

“How can photography play a constructive role in encouraging ‘Trusting Voices’ in an Age of A.I.?”

 

How is the position of a photographer as a prompter authentic? In the context of artificial intelligence, this question becomes central in re-evaluating authorship, agency, and trust within contemporary photographic practice. If an image no longer embodies a relationship with how it is made and the material index of a reality it records how is its meaning and use value reconstituted. The encounter and interpretation of experience, feelings, memories and what is personal or universal in relation to time, place and memory is subordinated to another kind of gesture if a ‘prompt’ can be thought of in this way?

 

Is ‘prompting’ then a photographic act or a dematerialised ‘gesture’, which could be substituted for other apparitions of aesthetic or creative endeavour whether a photograph, poem, musical composition all rendered synonymous as prescribed outcomes. Does AI generate ideas or instead aggregate existing data, which is not recognised and seen but dependent on other forms of description, inscription, cataloguing, keywording or metadata? Viewed through this lens, AI might represent a creative cul-de-sac? 

 

On the other ‘hand’ AI accelerates the ease of manipulation and transformation as a component of digital imaging where dexterity and hand-to-eye or haptic coordination of those affects is increasingly driven by algorithmic short cuts of a technological ‘application’ rather than a process reliant on tacit knowledge, skills and a visual aesthetic which is accrued through accumulated experience.

Does AI herald an epistemological and ontological shift in creativity or is it solely a mute replication and simulation of data scraped to present the (dis)illusion of a material experience?

 

How does AI impact upon archive related research in uncovering memories where the question of time, curiosity and the ability to make intuitive findings and suppositions is potentially supplanted by the instantaneous grasp of algorithm-driven relations and connections.

 

A negation of the experience of time and space is a destabilising one in what it potentially foreshadows. AI does not see or feel in what it appropriates without reference in order to generate a product of unknown origin, in a phantasmagoric act of delirious, wish-fulfilment. Where does authorship, agency and trust reside within the intellectual and ethical mire which AI has unleashed in the separation of artefact and intelligence? 

 

Is authenticity an ontological guarantee or instead a relational and ethical transaction which scaffolds trust, truth and belief systems in what is seen, sensed and experienced? On an ethical and moral level where does this leave humanity and our trust in information systems, image making, nature, the physical and virtual spaces we inhabit, and the technologies upon which our world view and relationship with others is shaped.

 

This call for papers invites responses to the above thoughts and propositions related to artificial intelligence, apparatus, technology, and materiality.

 

Chester Photo Festival Committee are Dr Alexandru Modoi, Dr Ceyiz Makal, Dr Ana-Christina Irian, Dr Cian Quayle, Professor Erik Knudsen and Dr Ian Clegg.

 

Keynote speakers will be announced in December.

 

Conference facilitated and organised by Dr Alexandru Modoi (a.modoi@chesterphotofestival.com) and Dr Cian Quayle (c.quayle@chester.ac.uk)

 

Symposium in partnership with the University of Chester hosted by 

BA (Hons) Photography and the Division of Art, Design and Innovation

 

Venue: 

School of Education Auditorium 

University of Chester 

Exton Park Campus

Chester CH1 4BJ

 

 

Abstracts, Biographies and Contact Details

 

Dr Tracy Piper-Wright

Trusting the process: long term daily photography and the evolving photographic self

 

Abstract: Photo-a-day, or ‘365’ projects were popular in the early 2000s providing both creative challenge and a record of daily life. While popularity has waned, there are many photographers who continue to pursue a daily photography practice. I am one, having been participating in photo-a-day since 2011via the website Blipfoto.com. 

Blipfoto was established in 2004 and currently has 10K+ users nationally and internationally. It is a community of practice which affords participants a shared space to sustain a photo-a-day project for many years, sometimes decades. As well as visual diary keeping, long-term photography can also become a sustained exploration of place, media or process. In this, it contrasts with concepts of amateur photography which centre on social media, the selfie and the snapshot. 

Drawing upon my experience of maintaining a long-term photo-a-day practice, and interviews with photographers who have been engaged in daily photography for similar lengths of time, this paper will argue that in the age of AI, daily photography is a radical human-centred practice, couched in the ordinariness of everyday observation. Daily photography is cyclical and emergent and is contextualised and validated through the accretion of images over months and years which present a slow evolution of a personal history; a sense of self not based on the performative gesture of display but grounded in an unfolding narrative. This paper will argue that this reflective, and reflexive, stance proposes a distinctive counterpoint to issues of authenticity and agency which beset contemporary digital and AI photography spaces and practices.

 

Biography: Tracy Piper-Wright is the Deputy Head of Art and Design at the University of Chester, where she also teaches on the BA Photography programme. She holds degrees in English and Philosophy (Hull), Fine Art (Wrexham), and a PhD in Fine Art (University of Wales). A practising artist, she works with experimental photographic processes, collage, and archival materials. Her research focuses on photography as a socio-cultural practice, examined through feminist and new materialist perspectives. She has investigated topics including photographic errors, women’s documentary photography, and sustainable darkroom practices, and has contributed to several UKRI-funded transdisciplinary arts and health projects.

 

tracypiperwright.co.uk 

@tracypiperwright

 

 

Holly Birtles (University of Brighton)

Fighting Fish, AI into Dark Room, Chennai Rivers

 

Abstract: Holly Birtles reflects on her ongoing work inspired by the Thames River in London and the estuary regions of Kent, Essex, and Suffolk, where performers embody choreographed roles as ‘Thames Monsters’ and Submerged Forests (Reid, 1913). During her residency in Chennai for the Chennai Photo Biennale and Photoworks, she extended this inquiry to the Adyar and Cooum rivers, identifying parallels of care and destruction. The paradox lies in reverence for these sacred sources, juxtaposed with toxicity caused by anthropocentric activity and infrastructural neglect. The paper presents project Fighting Fish through explorations of truth via sentimentality, myth, ecologies, and dedication, considering life and death of the river; rivers are living beings, not resources (MacFarlane, 2025).

Truth is layered in Birtles’ work; layered and performed truths can express authenticity more fully. In the darkroom, she pushes analogue materials, embracing chemical uncertainty through layering, solarisation, fogging, and surface intervention. These acts of hiding and concealment align with the ancient Greek concept of truth, aletheia, derived from lanthanein, meaning ‘to hide’ or ‘to conceal’ (Herzog, 2025). Birtles pairs analogue photographs with artificial intelligence, adopting Yuk Hui’s notion of CGI as ‘digital objects’ holding digital truth (Hui, 2016). Truths emerge through ecological fact, local stories and myths. Using MidJourney, she subverts repetition by feeding film-shot portraits, textures, performances, and places to generate evolving creatures. These become silver gelatin prints, their algorithmic multiplicity echoed through darkroom manipulation.

Fighting Fish embodies staged monstrosity, merging beauty with haze, mud, waste, life, and death. Performances using body language and wearable props convey ecological struggle, to reinforce frustration with governmental inefficiency. One series references Bas Jan Ader’s I’m Too Sad to Tell You, reworking emotional fragility through a melancholic figure entangled with a fish, reflecting despair and devotion to water.

The paper examines how darkroom experimentation, AI-generated ‘digital objects,’ and staged ecological performance form a framework for reimagining polluted rivers, their mythologies, ecological grief, and new truths.

 

Biography: Holly Birtles is a London-based photographic artist. Her practice incorporates performance, prop production, and digital/analogue techniques, often in collaboration with writers and musicians. Her work connects performance to place, exploring ecologies and personal narratives associated with specific ecosystems. Props and performances respond to natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions; sitters personify specific materials or structures related to the selected sites. Recent projects integrate performance and AI into darkroom processes, reflecting on slow violence, myth, and sentimentality associated with selected rivers. Birtles exhibits internationally and is course leader of BA (Hons) Photography at Brighton University.

 

h.birtles@brighton.ac.uk

www.hollybirtles.com

 

 

Dr Peter Ainsworth (London College of Communication)

Photorealism and the Voice of Non-Conscious Imaging Systems

 

Abstract: This paper examines the photographic as one of the teleological ideals toward which contemporary computational imaging systems are oriented. Drawing on Lev Manovich’s account of photorealism, the photographic is approached as a resilient visual code within AI-based image processes, no longer grounded in embodied experience or sensory capture, but in the internal logics and assumptions of those processes.
AI-generated imagery is currently most often associated with falsity, simulation, and exploitation, particularly when judged against documentary photographic conventions. This paper proceeds from the assumption that such positioning is historically contingent. As generative imaging systems become increasingly embedded within institutional and platform-based infrastructures, synthetic images may come to be equated with forms of authority that differ from their current reception.

The paper proposes a counterbalance between speculative claims surrounding AI imaging and attention to the conditions under which these systems operate in practice. Drawing on N. Katherine Hayles, AI is treated as a non-conscious cognitive system for which meaning is not an operative category. Practice-based work positions the photographer-as–prompt-engineer as a way of staging encounters with these systems, where voice emerges as a systemic trace at moments of instability and visual slippage. These moments become legible only in relation to photographic expectations brought to them by human viewers.
In this context, trust is not located in the truthfulness of AI-generated images, but in an attentiveness to the conditions under which their coherence falters—conditions that also reveal the ideological assumptions and material harms embedded within the voices of computational imaging systems.

 

Biography: I am a practice-based researcher and course leader MA Photography and Digital Practice at UAL working at the intersection of photography and computational imaging My work explores how emerging imaging technologies, such as photogrammetry, LiDAR, augmented reality, and generative AI, reshape the production, perception, and circulation of images. I examine how sense-data captured through apparatuses such as cameras is encoded within computational systems, and how these processes shape engagement, governance, and visibility. My recent work focuses on conceptualisations used by big tech to frame generative AI systems, especially their invocation of contemporary and historical science-fiction narratives.

 

p.ainsworth@lcc.arts.ac.uk

https://researchers.arts.ac.uk/1303-peter-ainsworth

 

 

Dr Paul Jones (Nottingham Trent University)

Strange Strangers: Artistic Agency, Generative AI, and the Analogue Ground

 

Drawing on Heidegger’s concept of anxiety, Timothy Morton’s strange stranger, and Vilém Flusser’s critique of apparatus, the paper interrogates the philosophical risks of creating images in the post-digital era.

Generative AI outputs can produce uncanny and hyperreal imagery that mirrors Morton’s strange stranger: familiar yet alien, predictable yet unsettling. This paper explores how these digital outputs embody Heidegger’s notion of groundlessness, where the structures of meaning dissolve. In response, my practice reintroduces analogue imperfections, such as grain, decay, and accidents, through the use of 35mm photography and VHS video. These analogue processes ground digital simulations in materiality, resisting the determinism of programmed tools and reclaiming unpredictability, while embracing ecological entanglements between human intention, machine processes, and physical mediums.

Through techniques like analogue cloaking, textmoshing, and the disembodied voice, I further examine the uncanny dynamics of working with generative AI. These practices highlight AI’s role as an active participant, a strange co-creator within an expanded ecology of creativity. My practice reflects Flusser’s notion of “playing against the apparatus,” where analogue interventions disrupt the logic of hyper-efficiency, allowing new forms of freedom and collaboration to emerge.

Using examples from my artistic research, this paper shows how combining generative AI with analogue aesthetics creates unexpected encounters with the strange and the familiar. It challenges established boundaries of creativity and invites audiences to rethink artistic agency, ecological awareness, and the future of narrative in the post-digital age.

 

Biography: I am an artist-researcher and academic working at the intersection of generative AI, critical theory and art pedagogy. My practice-led research examines AI through posthuman philosophy, Object-Oriented Ontology, and experimental studio methodologies, focusing on artistic agency, image-events, and human–machine co-production.

My work explores boundaries between human and nonhuman agency, image and event, and approaching AI as a site of encounter. I present this research across international academic and practice-based platforms, including Videotage: Art Basel Hong Kong, IKT Congress: Art & Advanced Technologies, and exhibitions at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, and Modal Gallery (SODA, Manchester Metropolitan University).

 

paul.jones02@ntu.ac.uk

https://www.instagram.com/stiwdio_llecynnau/

 

 

Professor Martin Newth (The Glasgow School of Art)

Event Horizons – between Image, Material and Machine

 

Abstract: This paper/presentation reflects on Martin Newth’s photographic project Event Horizons (2022–ongoing), which explores how images are encountered, trusted, and made meaningful when their referents are no longer grounded in physical places but in computationally generated worlds. The work consists of large-format photographs of AI-generated gaming landscapes, made by pointing a 10x8 view camera at a flat 4K monitor and processing the resulting negatives using home-made photographic chemistry derived from household and garden materials, including plant matter such as dried rosemary.

 

The project does not treat AI-generated imagery as a substitute for photography, nor photography as a corrective to AI. Instead, it stages their meeting. The virtual landscapes are re-encountered optically, materially, and temporally through the slow mechanics of large-format photography and improvised chemical processing. Dust, uneven development, light damage, and chemical residues all become part of the image, complicating any simple distinction between the virtual and the material, the generated and the made.

 

The use of household materials roots these images in a specific geographical and domestic site, although one very different from the places the images depict. The home-made chemistry also draws on the growth of online communities sharingmethods for ethical, non-extractive, and environmentally less damaging photographic processes.

 

This paper/presentation considers how these layered processes complicate the viewer’s relationship to the image. Event Horizons does not resolve questions of authenticity, authorship, or trust, but holds them open, using photography as a means to think through the complex relations between image and world, process and place, human intention and technical mediation. https://www.martinnewth.com/Event-Horizons.html

 

Biography: Martin Newth is Head of the School of Fine Art, and Professor of Art and Education, at The Glasgow School of Art. He studied at Newcastle University and the Slade School of Art. His photographs, films, and installations have been exhibited internationally, including at the Xiamen Art Museum, MEWO Kunsthalle, Axel Lapp Projects, Focal Point Gallery, Open Eye Gallery, and Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts. Previously, he held leadership roles at UAL and the RCA. His research also includes collaborations through the cross-European network. PNG, which explores how social and global conditions shape artistic production and pedagogy.

 

www.martinnewth.com

m.newth@gsa.ac.uk

 

 

India Lawton (Southampton Solent University)

Prompting as Gesture: Authorship, Trust, and Photography in an Age of AI

 

Abstract: This paper examines prompting as a photographic and ethical gesture within contemporary image-making practices that engage artificial intelligence. Rather than treating AI as either a creative tool to be embraced or a threat to authenticity to be resisted, the paper approaches AI-mediated practice as a site where questions of authorship, agency, and trust must be negotiated relationally and contextually.

Drawing on my practice as an artist-researcher working with photography, sound, and AI systems, the paper focuses on two recent works, Instinct Glyphs and Artificial Resonance. In these projects, prompts are used to generate idealised narratives of birth and to animate intimate photographic materials such as tears and breast milk. These outputs are not presented as expressions of machine creativity, but as echoes shaped by training data, cultural scripts, and algorithmic logics. Through processes of translation, from text to emoji, image to sound, stillness to motion, the works foreground how AI reproduces dominant ideals while flattening embodied, temporal, and sensory experience.

Positioning prompting as a dematerialised yet consequential gesture, the paper asks whether photographic authenticity can still be understood as an ontological guarantee tied to indexicality, or whether it must instead be approached as an ethical and relational transaction. Trust, it argues, does not reside within the AI system or the generated artefact, but emerges through disclosure, attentiveness to process, and the retention of material and experiential residues that resist automation.

By remaining with uncertainty rather than resolution, this paper contributes a practice-based perspective on how photography might encourage “trusting voices” in an age of AI, voices grounded not in technological authority, but in ethical situatedness, vulnerability, and care.

 

Biography: India Lawton is an artist and Senior Lecturer at Southampton Solent University, working across photography, sound, installation, and material processes. Her practice-led research explores maternal experience, sensory vulnerability, and the ethics of representation, with particular attention to bodily trace, absence, and care. She is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD alongside her academic role, examining how cultural narratives of birth are shaped, mediated, and flattened through visual and algorithmic systems. Recent work critically engages with artificial intelligence as a site of listening, authorship, and ethical tension, questioning how embodied experience is translated, and often lost, through digital and automated processes.

 

india.lawton@solent.ac.uk

https://indialawton.com/

 

 

Fergus Heron

Photography, Technologies and Different Natures

 

Abstract: This presentation discusses the context and methods of my ongoing practice-based research in which I propose that photography offers ways to develop analogies between the networked characteristics of the natural world and emerging technologies including artificial intelligence. In connection, by discussion of work that explores how photography can picture the natural world differently utilizing analogue processes, I respond to symposium questions of authorship, agency and materiality in relation to photography as medium and technology. With reference to Walter Benjamin’s idea of the Optical Unconscious, as well as corresponding reflections upon processes of depicting the natural world by practitioners of photography from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I suggest current discussions around photography and artificial intelligence can discover renewed significance in the convergence of technologies that led to the early development of photography, along with ancient understandings of nature. Rethinking photography as a set of networked agencies, in which human activity is de-centered, is therefore possible, rather than defining photography as a representational medium operating from singular human intentions, artistic or otherwise. With selected images from my ongoing projects shown as part of the presentation, I’ll elaborate on how photography practice acknowledges chance and contingency, considering how technologies, always different and developing, both new and old, subject photography itself to agencies of the natural world from which it originates and is inextricably interconnected with.

 

Biography: Fergus Heron (born 1972) is a British photographer known for his pictures with natural formations and urban environments. He lives and works in Brighton, England and Nairn, Scotland. Heron studied at the Royal College of Art and the University for the Creative Arts at Farnham. Exhibitions featuring his work have taken place at venues including Tate Britain. Publications include contributions to A Companion to Photography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2020), Emerging Landscapes (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014) and Visible Economies (Brighton: Photoworks, 2012). He is a Senior Lecturer and Course Leader for MA Photography at the University of Brighton.

 

f.heron@brighton.ac.uk

https://www.fergusheron.com/

 

 

Guy Mayman (DATAMOSH) Wrexham University

VAPE DREAM: Images from the Infected Archive

 

Abstract: VAPE DREAM, developed by Datamosh for the Wrong Biennale 2026, https://newart.city/show/d-a-t-a-m-o-s-hexplores how photographic images relate to the idea of trust in an age of artificial intelligence by imagining the photographic archive as a dynamic, hybrid space. The project investigates the migration of images between analogue origins and digital mediation, emphasizing processes of circulation, mutation, and recombination accelerated by algorithms then filtered through more established analogue processes. Rather than framing these transformations as threats to authenticity, Datamosh embraces them as creative tools—akin to the camera itself—asserting their role as authors within this evolving visual ecology.
 

By positioning the archive as simultaneously “inside” and “outside,” VAPE DREAM invites audiences to engage critically with questions of authorship and originality while experiencing the work through the flat plane of a screen, optically analogous to a photograph. This approach foregrounds transparency and dialogue, encouraging viewers to trust not in static notions of truth but in the integrity of process and intention. In doing so, photography becomes a constructive voice—mediating between human creativity and machine agency—offering optimism and openness in navigating the complexities of AI-driven image culture.
For the symposium Trusting Voices and Artificial Intelligence, Datamosh propose a live presentation of the evolving VAPE DREAM project, together with a text written for the symposium to be read out using AI speech synthesis.

 

Biography: DATAMOSH

Paul Jones completed his Doctorate at Aberystwyth University where he explored Heterotopic Friction. His work features internationally, including at 'Hyperobjectivity' Video Art Hong Kong. He recently wrote the chapter 'Humour as Heterotopic Friction' in 'Comedy in Crisis' (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Guy Mayman attended Central Saint Martins, De Ateliers Artist Institute, University of Chester and completed a Daiwa Scholarship. He has exhibited internationally and participated in the inaugural Mass Sculpture show.

Their collaboration DATAMOSH spans digital and analogue realms. Combining found technology and data, they improvise psychedelic montage. Outcomes take the form of film, photography, music, sculpture, performance and virtual artefacts.

 

guymayman@hotmail.com

https://www.instagram.com/d_a_t_a_m_o_s_h/

 

 

Neuza Morais (University of Chester)

not nor

 

Abstract: not nor is a practice-based, iterative artwork developed between 2024 and 2025 that explores identity, belonging, and processes of uncloseting through language, movement, sound, and collaboration. The project is informed by feminist theory, particularly bell hooks’ writing on the margin as a space of radical openness, resistance, and possibility. From this position, uncertainty is approached as a productive condition for learning, relationality, and transformation.

The work first took form in 2024 as an installation for Chester Photo Festival, using words placed on walls and mirrors. Viewers were invited to complete the prompt “I am…” while facing their own reflection, positioning identity as relational, provisional, and shaped through movement and presence. In 2025, not nor II expanded this enquiry through a poem that functioned as a generative score for collaboration. Dancers, performers, designers, photographers, and musicians responded to the text, contributing to two live performances. Meaning emerged through collective interpretation and embodied response.

Situated within the context of growing reliance on AI, not nor positions lived identity as a process that resists automation. Where AI operates through prediction, replication, and pattern recognition, this work insists on becoming as unstable, embodied, and relational. By engaging the margin as a consciously chosen ethical, political, and social site, the project examines how voice, presence, and ways of relating to the world and to others can emerge through practice as a mode of inquiry, rather than predefined identities. In this sense, not nor offers a critique of AI’s claim to voice and authorship, asserting lived, relational formation as a site of meaning that cannot be produced through automated systems.

 

Biography: I am a Portuguese architect and creative practitioner based in Chester. I am completing a Doctorate in Education at the University of Chester, where I explore The Missing Building as a research framework that examines spatial justice through feminist theory and participatory and arts based methods, challenging top-down approaches in the built environment. Alongside this, I have been working on not nor, which is informed by queer theory, as a relational way of knowing, thinking and making that critically engages positionality across self, others and space.

 

n.morais@chester.ac.uk

www.neuzamorais.com

 

 

Kypros Kyprianou (Newcastle University)

One Eye Good, Two Eyes Better: Navigating the Indexical Mirage of Machine Stereoscopy

 

Abstract: This paper examines how photography can generate trust, belief, and affect in an age of generative AI through the practice-based project Unland Imaginaries. The series presents stereoscopes and depth mattes based on street-view mapping imagery. The images are transformed by AI prompts drawn from interviews with people who once lived on either side of the Nicosia buffer zone. These prompts mediate memory, automated vision, and historical experience, producing images that sit between memory, reconstruction, and imagination.

In some images, the military infrastructure of the buffer zone is partially erased and replaced with elements derived from the testimony prompts. Absence is transformed into possibility: the work simultaneously remembers the past and imagines alternative futures through the layering of human memory and AI-generated reconstruction. Artificial stereoscopy induces a flicker between presence and absence, depth and flatness. It moves viewers between belief and doubt, bringing the ethical and affective stakes of seeing into view.
Engaging Flusser’s notion of the photographic apparatus and Zylinska’s account of AI-driven perception, the paper treats authenticity as a relational, ethical transaction rather than an indexical guarantee. The project demonstrates how photography can mediate between memory, AI, and human perception, encouraging ethical engagement with what is seen.

 

k.kyprianou2@ncl.ac.uk

www.neveroddoreven.org

 

 

Nam Huh (Loughborough University)

Relational Trust and Post-Photographic Practice in an Age of AI: The Case of Tzusoo

 

Abstract: In contemporary photographic and moving-image practices, the proliferation of AI-generated imagery and algorithmically mediated circulation raises urgent questions about authorship, agency, and trust. Drawing on post-photographic theory (Ritchin), Azoulay’s civil contract of photography, Sekula’s conception of the archive as political apparatus, Chun’s critique of media infrastructures, and Appadurai’s analysis of mediated memory, this paper argues that trust is not an inherent property of images but a socially and ethically negotiated condition, constituted through production, circulation, and engagement.

AI functions as a contemporary photographic apparatus, reshaping the conditions under which images are produced and received, collapsing temporal, material, and affective dimensions. Within this context, post-photographic and hybrid practices - combining duration, archival research, and digital-material mediation - offer critical interventions that foreground ethical responsibility and relational accountability. These practices reveal how authorship and authenticity operate as negotiated constructs, rather than as ontological guarantees.

Case studies, including Tzusoo’s AI- and digitally mediated projects (Dalle’s Aimy, Agarmon Encyclopedia: Leaked Edition), illustrate how contemporary artists navigate these tensions. Her work demonstrates the productive potential of AI to interrogate authorship, representation, and visibility, highlighting how mediated subjects and voices are constituted across algorithmic and material registers without reducing ethical engagement to technological determinism.

By foregrounding relational trust, ethical mediation, and the critical legibility of authorship, this paper contends that photography’s constructive role in an AI-inflected era lies in scaffolding accountable, socially embedded, and critically attentive modes of image-making that amplify marginalised or mediated voices while maintaining the ethical and affective dimensions of seeing, knowing, and believing.

 

Biography: Nam Huh is a UK-based curator and researcher working at the intersection of media art, diasporic identity, and postcolonial theory. Their practice explores experimental, community-driven storytelling through immersive technologies, sound, and socially engaged processes. They have curated exhibitions and events across the UK, South Korea, and Europe. Nam is currently pursuing a PhD in Communications and Media, focusing on experimental documentary film. Recent projects examine queer and East and Southeast Asian migrant representation, post-internet documentary practices, and digital ecologies, with particular attention to how images, sound, and participation shape contemporary photo-based and moving-image cultures within global, diasporic, and postcolonial contexts.

 

flexibleimmobility@gmail.com

 

 

Alberto Gonzalez

Prompting Chance: Can AI Reproduce Human-based Photographic Unpredictability?

 

Abstract: This paper investigates whether artificial intelligence (AI) can meaningfully reproduce the role of chance in photographic practice. Building on the long-standing recognition of accident and unpredictability as central to the ontology of photography, this study explores whether the use of stochastic systems —where randomness is formally constrained and operationalised within rule-based computational processes (Galanter, 2003)—can substitute for material contingencies that have historically defined image-making. Two human-made photographs involving unstable materials (i.e., electrical sparks and bubbles) were compared with AI-generated images produced through prompting in ChatGPT-5. By varying prompt-specificity and analysing the resulting outputs through fluency-based creativity framework, the study evaluates both aesthetic semblance and structural variability. Results showed that while AI systems can simulate visual markers of unpredictability, they do not replicate material indeterminacy produced by the uncontrollable physical interactions that characterises photographic chance (Edwards, 2006). Algorithmic randomness is epistemic rather than ontological with probabilistic systems detached from the physical world. AI’s stochastic generation replaces material intra-action through language-based prompting inviting to reconsider how agency, materiality, and indeterminacy are distributed when images are computationally generated rather than human made.

 

Biography: Alberto Gonzalez is a PhD student in Photography at the University of Chester, where he previously completed a BA in Photography and an MA in Fine Art. His practice-based research investigates indeterminacy and agency in photographic practice, examining how chance operates across material processes, contextual strategies, post-production interventions, and artificial systems. Through staged experiments, tonal inversion, microscopic imaging, unstable print materials, and AI-generated imagery, his work explores the shifting relationship between control, unpredictability, and meaning-making in photography. Alongside his doctoral research, Alberto teaches art and photography at college level.

 

1720251@chester.ac.uk

@agonzalezbaphotography 

 

 

Emery C. Walshe 

Phantasms of Reality: Material Dialogues in the Age of Digital Disillusionment

 

Abstract: In an increasingly digitalised world, photographs—especially the photo album—can constitute a reorganisation of space, time, and relationality. The proliferation of AI-generated content and the digitalisation of culture decouple the image from both its representative body and the time of its capture/creation. This disconnection from material culture functions as a phantasm of the real, an illusion of the past and present, that nulls the senses.

What is lost in the deluge of endless replication and unending algorithmic entertainment lies Walter Benjamin’s aura, and for photography, its ‘melancholy and incomparable beauty.’ (p. 27) The melancholia of the photograph, especially when sequenced into an album, presents to viewers a sensorial and relational experience through the act of flipping through the past. This same act, taken into a digital realm, loses the weight of reality, as it disconnects the sensual apparatus of human experience that fosters critical engagement, diluting it through a screen and abstracting the index into the incorporeal. 

This paper aims to recentre photographs as material—sensual—objects, and in doing so, reveal a complicated mesh between image and viewer within Roland Barthes ‘that-has-been’—the indexical reminder that this moment must have happened (pp. 76-7). I will contend that the photographic object can ground material experience in an increasingly AI-generated, digital world. In the disillusionment with AI fabrications, photography’s indexical claim to the past blurs, as image-generation replaces image-creation, supplanting the artistic and documentary humanity behind the lens with artifice.

 

Biography: Emery is a writer and researcher in the history of photography, with a special interest in photography’s melancholia and the ontological questions this raises through a queer and feminist lens. They have previously written for MuseumsETC on Edith Tudor Hart. They graduated from the University of St Andrews in 2025, receiving their master’s in the History of Photography and have a background in Cyber Security and Digital Forensics.

 

walshe.emery@gmail.com

 

 

Stephen Clarke and Tom Hignett (University of Chester)

In Full Colour: Memories of Seaside Holidays

 

Abstract: Stephen Clarke has explored his own family’s holidays at the seaside in a number of exhibitions – most recently the touring exhibition ‘End of the Season’. These exhibitions incorporate digital montages, print ephemera, tour guides, family snapshots, photozines and black and white photographic prints. In his work Clarke attempts to present his own memories of family holidays and prompt his audiences own recollections of their holidays at the seaside.

The paper / exhibition will use Clarke’s black and white photographs of Blackpool. This seaside destination was a favourite for working class families in the north west of England. Although Clarke photographed this resort over a long period of time (from the early 1980s through to the late 1990s), his pictures were shot on black and white film and consequently the colour of the subject is lost. Clarke’s photographs will be colourised by the use of AI technology. This new process can be compared to the hand-tinting of photographs and postcards that was used earlier in the twentieth century before colour film was affordable. This process of AI colourisation will be applied by his collaborator Tom Hignett. It is intended that this process of adding colour to the black and white photograph will mimic the earlier process but also raise the question of how we can reclaim an enhanced subjective memory of the family holiday (distinct from an objective record of the place). 

 

Biography: Stephen Clarke is Senior Lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies at the University of Chester. He studied Fine Art and photography at Newport College of Art in South Wales and then, as a postgraduate, Contemporary Art and Theory (1994 - 1996) and then Fine Art Printmaking (2003 - 2004) at Winchester School of Art in Hampshire. Clarke’s work responds to his experience of place. His subjects are the places where he has lived, as well as tourist sites; especially the British seaside. Although his work is predominantly photographic, he also uses collage. He has an interest in print material: magazines, postcards, guide books, and ephemera.

 

s.clarke@chester.ac.uk

https://www.stephenclarkearchive.com/

t.hignett@chester.ac.uk