INTERVIEW

Paris Photo: Conceptual art & synthetic photography in the age of AI

Anna Ridler, Sofia Crespo and Kevin Abosch in conversation with Charlotte Kent.

CONCEPTUAL ART AND SYNTHETIC PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. Part of the conversation program by Paris Photo 2023

Photography is everywhere and yet emergent technologies complicate how we think about the photograph, the image, the object. How to understand the changes in image production produced by the variety of AI softwares? If photography has always had a relationship with technology and innovation, then the last few years of image production have emphasized that. If photography served as documentation for Conceptual Art, then the visualizations produced by machine learning softwares can 'document' the intricate problems and opportunities of these technologies.

Today, photography includes synthetic processes that create optical images through computational systems and data sets. Many leading artists on display in the Digital Sector use these technologies to broach complex issues relevant to our contemporary and the systems that surround us. Artists Anna Ridler, Kevin Abosch, and Sofia Crespo joined Charlotte Kent to discuss their practice, references, and conceptual efforts.

Kevin Abosch

Kevin Abosch (b.1969) is an Irish conceptual artist known for his works in photography, sculpture, installation, AI, blockchain, and film. Abosch’s work addresses the nature of identity and value by posing ontological questions and responding to sociological dilemmas. Abosch’s work has been exhibited throughout the world, often in civic spaces, including The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; The...

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Sofia Crespo x Anna Ridler

Sofia Crespo is an artist working with a huge interest in biology-inspired technologies. One of her main focuses is the way organic life uses artificial mechanisms to simulate itself and evolve, this implying the idea that technologies are a biased product of the organic life that created them and not a completely separated object. Crespo looks at the similarities between techniques of AI image...

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Galerie Nagel Draxler

Galerie Nagel Draxler (formerly Galerie Christian Nagel) was founded in 1990 and operates in Cologne, Berlin, Munich and Meseberg. They are proud to be a gallery that has a history, a present and a future. An emphasis lies on an established artist generation, that has been showing with them since the beginning and whose work has been strongly influential for following generations. Their...

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NGUYEN WAHED

NGUYEN WAHED is a London-based gallery, which program evolves around but is not limited to digital and generative art practices. Focusing on contemporary artists (Leander Herzog, Sofia Crespo) who embody the intersection of technology and creativity, it expands onto rediscovering select phenomena in the peripheries of digital art starting from the 1960s (Manfred Mohr) to the first neural-network...

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