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 each variation, photographs and data are collected from the exhibition space and people in it. The collected data and images are then used as training sets for the next variation. As with AI image creation, the logic from past datasets is reiterated in each new work, mimicking the constantly evolving data sets that inform machine learning platforms.
V3: Model Collapse at The Photographers' Gallery 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.
The other chapters of Variations
V3: Model Collapse at The Photographers' Gallery follows on from:
- V1: Content Aware which reflected on the global infrastructure that supports the digital economy (Photoworks Weekender, Brighton, October 2024).
- V2: Rigged which brought together extractive processes that exploit people and the land and deplete resources (QUAD Gallery, FORMAT International Photography Festival, Derby, 13 March - 15 June 2025)
The final chapter in the four-part project, V4: Repository, will highlight the role of the data storage centre as a site of transmission and as an extractive and polluting process in its own right. V4 will be on show at Stills Centre for Photography in Edinburgh this autumn (6 November 2025 - 7 February 2025).
Variations in Brighton and Derby
Find out more about Felicity Hammond
Felicity Hammond (b. 1988, Birmingham, UK) is an artist based in South London. Hammond received an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art in London in 2014 and a PhD in Contemporary Art Research from Kingston University in 2021. Her first institutional solo exhibition Remains in Development took place in 2020/2021 at C / O Berlin and Kunsthal Extra City Antwerp.
She has exhibited her work in international group exhibitions at museums and galleries including Fondazione Mast Bologna, Fotomuseum Winterthur, VOX Centre de l’image Contemporaine Montreal, Higher Pictures New York and Saatchi Gallery London, amongst others. Hammond has worked on a number of public art works, including a 30 metre site-specific work for Photo 2021 Melbourne, Australia and a large scale installation for Colchester and Ipswich Museum, UK. Hammond’s work has received and been nominated for a number of awards, including being the recipient of the Ampersand Photoworks Fellowship (2023). She was awarded the Lumen Art Prize (2018), FOAM Talent (2016), and the British Journal of Photography International Photography Award (single image winner, 2016). Hammond’s first book, Property, was published in 2019 by SPBH Editions.
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.
