What happens when AI-generated images that aren’t physical things in the material world are fed back into it? How does it interpret that data, and how do they start to shift and almost poison the machine?
- Felicity Hammond
Variations is an evolving installation investigating the processes and power dynamics at play in a new era of photography.
Developed across four UK venues in 2024-25, Felicity Hammond (b. 1988, UK) uses artificial intelligence (AI) to map how digital photographic material makes its journey from mineral to pixel; and from beneath the Earth’s surface to the screen.
During the staging of the last two variations at Brighton and Derby, photographs and data were collected from the exhibition spaces and people in them. The collected data and images have been used as training sets for each subsequent variation, including V3: Model Collapse at The Photographers' Gallery. Like AI image creation, the reiteration of past datasets in each new work mimics the constantly evolving data sets that inform machine learning platforms.
V3: Model Collapse is the third part of the four-part project Variations. It offers an encounter with AI hallucinations through photographic images that have been destabilised. Using different methods from painting to collage, the photographs reflect the errors and inconsistencies of AI generated images, where the output is always an imitation.
The resulting images depict distorted perspectives and ghostly figures. They begin to collapse and fall apart, full of impossibilities and inaccuracies. V3: Model Collapse invites us to act as both witnesses to, and participants in, the process of machine learning. In doing so, it asks us to question the long term impact AI has on photography.
Variations in Brighton and Derby
Variations is commissioned through the Ampersand Foundation & Photoworks Fellowship, a unique biennial opportunity for a mid-career artist to complete and exhibit a new body of work. The Fellowship aims to enable the artist through a combination of support including a £15,000 award; mentoring and curatorial support; a dedicated public programme and digital content with international reach; a production budget and a touring exhibition. Supported by Arts Council England and Spectrum.
