Photo Fakery

A Compiler project that explores notions of reality and non-reality in analogue and digital photography, while thinking critically about alternative potentials of AI and embedded automation in digital image making.

Modern-day smartphone photography is a useful area to explore this: even a “simple” still image is made with the help of multiple other unseen images, manipulations and AI processes, in order to resemble analogue photographs.

These processes help:

focus on faces or people
blend images from two or more phone cameras
create artificial depth-of-field
remove red-eye
balance brightness and contrast
auto-adjust exposure (e.g. in very bright or dark settings)
apply subtle auto-enhancements throughout

As a result, digital images are arguably increasingly further from reality, constructed through a series of automated decisions that shape what we see.

Photography (digital or analogue) has always contained contested elements of truth and fiction. But digital images today are mediated at every step, from capture to final render, with degrees of complexity that are difficult to demystify.

Byproducts inherent to these processes produce interesting effects in themselves, which are becoming more present in visual languages used in sci-fi and speculative storytelling. 3D point clouds, which often depict verification tools, fragmented memories, surveillance footage, or data access, have been used in recent films and video games like The Creator, Alien: Romulus, and Cyberpunk 2077.

In workshops, events and exhibited outputs, these ideas are explored using a custom-built web app which incorporates MiDaS and Dept Anything V2, (local/offline AI tools that create 3D depth maps from still images).

Iterations of Compiler Photofakery workshops have beed delivered at:

V&A South Kensington (Is this for Real? Late)
Somerset House (Digital/Body Collage for Wayne McGregor: Infinite Bodies public programme)
Peckham Digital

Another project, named Every Picture Tells a Story, was commissioned as part of ARTificial Intelligence: Show Me a Story about AI (research project led by University of Nottingham) to research and develop this work further.

Details and project outcomes can be found here: https://art-i.compiler.zone/