Decisive: Blurring the Lines

2 Sept

Cliff

Midjourney

Arun Misra talks with Henry Rice

Rice explores the intersection of modern technology and photography, twisting the essence of decisive moments. Using an iPhone 11 Pro’s QuickTake Video feature, Rice recorded five-second videos and extracted stills, creating 180 images that highlight motion and cultural diversity without featuring people directly. This approach emphasises being present and adds emotional weight to each captured image. Each image’s semiotics were analysed by Chat GPT-4.0 and mirrored using Midjourney, resulting in 180 corresponding AI-generated images. The combined 360 images reflect on the superficiality of networked visuals, the tension between individual and globalised identities, and the significant role of AI in reshaping our understanding of photographic reality.

Henry and I had a fascinating conversation about Decisive. Here is what we talked about.

Arun: You have mentioned the superficiality of visual networks and tensions between individual and globalised identities. Can you un-pick these and talk what this work tells us about our relationship with AI?

Henry: It’s quite broad what I'm talking about but I’ll try to narrow it down, as I think it’s all connected to the same feelings that are experienced when interacting with networked images. Images we encounter or create that are then put online become imbued with a directness of the creator, whilst also being lost into an almost endless sea of near-identical images. You go on a wonderful hike and want to take a photo of the view, once you upload it it's catalogued with all the other views, nearly identical. That moment becomes seemingly superficial by its repetition and this degrades the moment with an expectation of ‘conclusivity’. However all are real, evidence of countless people enjoying a similar experience within this hypothetical hike. I find this contradiction in the networked image very interesting, as it is both superficial and honest. Now with AI the hike could never have been undertaken, but a hike built off all of the hikes experienced contained within this new imagery dream. We are currently at the point where this dream is becoming sometimes indistinguishable from reality in the photo/image.

Arun: I love your phrase ‘imagery dream’. You say that the same feelings are experienced when interacting with networked images. What are these feelings? How do they impact upon the viewers?

Henry: The feeling of hyper reality is intertwined with both the networked image and AI created images. Reality becomes this imagery dream with the AI’s image, but it's all created from the foundation of the networked image. How this hyperreality is experienced for the viewer depends heavily on the content of the imagery, but the presence of ambivalence is attached, from disassociation with intimacy, meaning and superficiality. AI and networked images both share this emotion for me.

Arun: What drove you to explore the intersection between photography and technology? Isn’t photography born out of technology and how does this heritage affect the future?

Henry: Yes I think Photography was born out of scientific exploration as well as an artistic and economic drive. I find it fascinating how every generation has a unique interaction with photography. From the evolution of cameras, film, digital cameras, smartphones. For myself, it was the smartphone that led me to use DSLR cameras. It’s fun speculating how Augmented Reality and AI will be new explosions into the field. Photography will ever expand alongside tech until it will balloon out to become something truly beyond itself.

Arun: The prospect of photography ballooning beyond recognition is exciting and futuristic. What could this look and feel like?

Henry: I believe it has already happened, however, the transition of unrecognition exists relative to the point of interaction. If a Victorian familiar with daguerreotype would encounter contemporary photography I believe they would consider it ‘beyond’. So when I talk about photography ballooning into something truly beyond itself, I refer to my own reference point. The mapping of memories and dreams into physical imagery is a realistic possibility in coming years. At that point, no camera would be required for image creation, just direct human interaction to a storage system. This I can somewhat visualise in application, but not interaction or where the next steps in development would take us. A big question is how people interact with these images. The interaction would heavily affect the feel, making it very hard to speculate the change in emotional engagement.

Arun: The method you have devised is really fascinating. Can you talk about the challenges that you faced?

Henry: I started taking these short videos when I got the iPhone 11 Pro. It was nice to pause for a moment. To watch the world on the screen of the phone captured in real-time, after I had been compelled by training and desire to take a photo. It then became a habit, I had no intention for what these images/videos would be used for I simply enjoyed the process of taking them.

Earlier this year I was then playing with AI, really playing with no intention just seeing how it worked and what tricks it can do, what I could do to break it or push it too far. I realised whilst playing with Chat GPT4.0 that it was using an adaptation of photographic semiotics to translate my prompts into its own prompts for Dalle, its image generator. It was then when I thought up the methodology I would use for the project, it came together in my head, I could see it. I was thinking hard to try and find a balance of objectivity of the subject matter as well as retaining an emotional depth. I attempted this by careful selection of one hundred and eighty videos then stills from my collection of short videos, poor images from my iPhone, a personal diary of the last four years. I would then have one AI engine analyse them and give me the semiotics, a text record of the image. I would then only use the semiotics to ask another engine to create an image. The three connected, but apart.

Then I would display them only with the time and date. I wanted to abstract reality and give weight to the created semiotics, whilst also preserving real moments.

Arun: What do you hope to achieve and when will you know this work is finished?

Henry: I hope to have created a time stamp. Technology moves so fast that within a year's time if this project was repeated the result would be fundamentally different. The feelings that accompany a time of developmental change are contradictory, fear and hope. The feelings of lived experience however are harder to change, often remaining rigid. I would like the work to speak of this, but I would also hope the images have their own poetic narrative.

I don’t think the project is finished. I am currently in the process of working with my wife, a designer, to put it in a book. All of the images and semiotics in one place, preserved. Once this is done I think the project is more conclusively finished. However, I will play and repeat the method in the future after a few years, and then see the relationship between the two bodies of work. It might be interesting, it might not but I am curious to see.

Arun: This is fascinating. A repeat in a few years as you envisage could create a an evolutionary thread, stamps in time, that people could look back upon and see how our relationship with photography, AI and mass proliferation of similar looking networked imagery has impacted on the consumption of images. I am really looking forward to seeing the Decisive photo book. Thank you.

Gallery

The gallery shows 10 paired images from this project and gives a flavour of the images emerging from the project. The first in the pair [1A, 2A, 3A, 4A, and 5A] are images taken by iPhone 11. The second in the pair is the image created by AI from semiotics analysis and Midjourney.