From photography to the convoked image: AI, digital archaeology, and documentary
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Abstract
Two hundred years after the first photograph attributed to Nicéphore Niépce, visual culture faces a conceptual transformation: images generated by artificial intelligence challenge the categories through which photography has historically been understood. This essay argues that so-called “AI-generated photography” should not be conceived as an extension of photography, but as a convoked image: a visual form produced through the interaction of language, visual archives, statistical models, interfaces, and human imagination. Drawing on Jaron Lanier, Lev Manovich, Vilém Flusser, Jussi Parikka, Sarah Pink, Ian Goodfellow, Alec Radford, Luke Metz, Soumith Chintala, Jonathan Ho, Ajay Jain, and Pieter Abbeel, the article argues that these images are not taken, but requested, calculated, and made to appear. It proposes an anthropology of computational images and an archaeology of the convoked image to understand how AI constructs, reconstructs, and recodes possible worlds, as well as its implications for documentary practice, memory, social imagination, and contemporary artistic creation.
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References
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