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 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