Nemotype is a term coined by the researcher and independent curator Sema D'Acosta, which immerses us in the nostalgia of ancestral photographic techniques, such as the calotype, the daguerreotype or the antotype, whose suffix, “type”, comes from the Greek “mold”, while “nemo” means nobody in Latin. A neologism that, in plural, gives the title to the exhibition dedicated to the Veronica Room from Murcia to Joan Fontcuberta (Barcelona, 1955), where eight series have been brought together in which the renowned photographer, National Photography Award in 1994, Essay in 1998, and the only Spaniard to have received the prestigious Hasselblad, in 2013, has turned to artificial intelligence (AI).
If there is a parallel between the dawn of photography and today, it is the fear of the future offered by new technologies. “Paradoxically, connections can be drawn between this new version of photography [la creada por IA] and its principles, since around 1840 researchers were already amazed that for the first time it was possible to capture reality without the intervention of the human hand,” D'Acosta writes in the catalog that accompanies the exhibition, of which it is commissar. “With mnemonics, we once again insist on the danger that an element other than the human being can conceive spontaneous images.”
“We are experiencing a new revolution,” warns Fontcuberta during a telephone conversation with Babelia, “not of change or transition, but of rupture. There is a before and after”. Before photography, drawing and painting were the only techniques capable of representing reality. Manual techniques that required the talent and expertise of artists. With the arrival of the photographic medium, this ability was called into question, since anyone skilled in using a camera could obtain more perfect descriptive images of reality. “Today the same thing happens,” adds the artist, “it is no longer necessary to go out into the street to photograph something, since there are millions of accumulated images of what is happening there. “Simply by giving instructions to the AI we can modulate an image until we get exactly what we want.”
This new revolution began approximately 20 years ago. In those days, Fontcuberta, always porous to the questions that define the moment in which he lives without stopping looking back, began to investigate different methods of representing reality that dispense with the camera, giving shape to the series Topophonies (1993-1995), whose purpose was to extract sound from a certain place, in contrast to Pythagoras' idea of celestial music. Hence, the profile of a mountain became music, and a sound frequency became the teeth of a mountain range. Today, the Silicon Graphics computers that powered the series have become obsolete and unworkable. “The problem with AI is that it seems to us that it is a spontaneous mushroom, that has just grown now, without us realizing it,” highlights the artist, but sophisticated algorithms and computing systems have been here for a long time without us calling them AI, we were not even aware that they were algorithmic systems.” At the turn of the century, the author would carry out Orogenesis (2002), through a program of three-dimensional modeling that converted a flat image, a map, into a volume, a three-dimensional image. Instead of using cartographic information, it will use codifications extracted from masterpieces of the landscape genre. “That was already a form of AI,” the author clarifies. “ChatGPT has made us see that something is happening, but it is only the culmination of a process that goes back two decades.”
Fontcuberta defines the exhibition as “prophylactic”, conceived with the aim of “protecting us from the blind trust that technical images transcribe reality without intervention, as if they were windows or pure mirrors”. “During the Age of Enlightenment, naturalists tried to account for the diversity of our planet through illustrations of plants and animals that were ideologically intended to be photographs, but had no technique,” adds the photographer. “Thus, when photography appears, we finally achieve a pencil of nature, or a mirror of memory (two expressions of how photography was known in the 19th century). That idea has taken root and until very recently we thought that photography was condemned to offer us evidence; to do nothing more than record, literally, what was in front of the lens. We have lived in ignorance. And now we are unlearning something we should never have learned. We should have understood that this was an option, not an ontological mandate of photography. For me, the camera is still a technology of vision, like the pencil or brush was in its day.”
Working with AI has meant for the author an experience that allowed him to solve technical issues, which previously required a lot of time and competence, in a much simpler way. “A time and energy that you can dedicate to thinking, imagining and deploying your own fantasy and concepts. “AI has become a liberation from a series of activities, which I certainly do not renounce,” he warns. “It is not that the entire manual aspect is going to disappear, but simply that the artisanal way becomes an option.” On the other hand, AI offers what the photographer refers to as “a reverse ekphrasis”, a figure that in the history of art refers to the description of an image with words. “At a time when images could not be reproduced, experts turned to words to try to describe them as accurately as possible. Today it happens to us the other way around; he prompt what it does is an ekphrasis that produces an image. The problem is that the instructions we give to the machine agree with the mental idea that one has. In how the algorithm has been trained, in short, in taming the system. I like to correct the results until I get what I wanted. Not letting the machine with its technological unconscious surprise me with accidental results. This could be another way of working, but it would be the one that would least suit certain lines of work.”
Among the series included in the exhibition are those made in co-authorship with Pilar Rosado, such as The little death (2020), Phrenography (2021) and Deja vu (2021–2023). The petite mort, whose title refers to the moment of orgasm in French, where there is almost a slight fading or momentary death of the senses, overlaps two sets of anonymous portraits that express very similar facial features. It is not known if the protagonists enjoy or suffer. The authors searched for images on a Dutch portal, where users publish their videoselfies of the moment of an orgasm, to compare those moments of climax with other images from the photographic files of the drug trafficking murders of the Mexican magazine Alert. They gave shape to replicas where the ingredient of pleasure or suffering is indistinguishable.
In Freak Show II (2023), the author sets out to redefine monstrosity using the Internet, as an indeterminate space in which to discover current monsters. Chimerical beings covered by tattoos, piercings, with implants, eating disorders or plastic surgeries, elements that allow them to escape uniformity. Where otherness is understood “not as a threat related to our fears, but as the embodiment of the different, of that which flees from standards and seeks to distance itself from the canon.” These are extreme images that the author collected and have been interpreted by the AI as a mnemonic where fiction and reality overlap. “The term monster has changed its meaning,” observes Fontcuberta. “We can call someone a monster either because they do something well and are inimitable, or because they cause terror. It is an ambivalence typical of contemporaneity, a swing between the sublime and the abject. Monstrosity is an aesthetic category of our time. We live in a landscape of monsters, but not of biology, but of language, politics, and aesthetics. In all spheres of life there are monstrosities.”
In Deja vu The authors apply the technology of generative neural networks to a set of images of works belonging to the Prado Museum in order to produce new works in plastic continuity with the existing ones and rethink the role of images of artistic heritage when formatting our sensitivity, the interdependence of images.
“We live in a world in which images create worlds, opinions and states of consciousness. A cause without images is a lost cause,” the author emphasizes, while referring to “iconophagy as the parable of the hunger for images in our time.” However, “as images become more widespread, they also dematerialize and enter the category of non-things.” Images that to exist need to have devoured others. “And the most eloquent case is that of the algorithms themselves: to take a photograph with AI, we must provide the algorithm with many images so that it can digest them and excrete them in the form of a result to our requests.” Thus, within this context of “desacralization of the image”, the artist's task is to “teach people to read images, to not become their subjects, but sovereigns of their use and functionality.”
'Nemotypes by Joan Fontcuberta'. Veronica Room. Murcia. Up to april 28th.
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