Oct 2023

Martine has been down to Bristol to speak at the Royal Photographic Society’s conference on Photography and Artificial Intelligence. This international two-day event brought speakers from across the globe, both in-person and joining via Zoom to hear a variety of speakers’ views on visually generative AI software and its outcomes.

Martine’s presentation ‘New Topographies: Man-altered Landscapes become Machine-altered Landscapes’ examined her research on a body of images by artist Craig Ames. She first encountered these AI works back in March ’23 at Derby’s Format Photography Festival. Her reaction to seeing Ames’s outputs based on the seminal 1975 New Topographics exhibition led her to ask; how might AI software have made the outputs it did following Ames’s prompts?  And moreover, what impact they had on a viewer seeing them for the first time?

Her well-received findings brought a mixture of insights into this technology and the way in which it plunders and interprets existing (frequently copyrighted) photographs and creates its controversial, unsettling and in some cases, laugh-out-loud results.

Thank you to The RPS for hosting such a fascinating and expansive conference. The papers themselves will be published in a forthcoming book of the conference proceedings in spring 2024. Watch this space….