Ways of Remixing
Ways of Remixing is an artistic research project that attempts to make sense of our contemporary image culture from a photographer's perspective. A photographer who, at first glance, might seem to have betrayed her colleagues by turning to generative AI systems to make new work. My argument is that generative images did not create a crisis in contemporary photography; they revealed one that was always already present. The indexical guarantee of photography, its claim to faithfully record reality, was always more fragile than the culture built upon it wished to believe.
The thesis moves between personal essay and academic theory, drawing on postmodernism, hauntology, post-photography, and apparatus theory. I look at the work of three artists – Charlie Engman, Weronika Gesicka, and Joan Fontcuberta – as envisioners in Vilém Flusser's sense: practitioners who turn the automatic apparatus against its own condition of being automatic. I position Refik Anadol as the counter-example: the functionary who mistakes the program for vision.
The thesis concludes with an analysis of my series, Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue, which explores the unconscious and how learned patterns of behavior slowly take over our lives without us even realizing it. In this series, I use generative AI not through text prompts but through an iterative image-to-image process, feeding the apparatus fragments of my personal archive so that two black boxes can communicate with each other: my own visual unconscious and the machine's compressed archive of collective visual memory. Here, they connect, influence, and most importantly, break their learned patterns of behavior together. What emerges is neither purely mine nor purely the machine's, but something that exists in the space between the two. It is the ghost of my archive, filtered through the collective visual imagination of everything the model was ever trained on.
The series and the thesis are parallel investigations of the same question: what it means to work honestly inside a technology that is reshaping visual culture from the ground up, and whether, within that condition, genuine critical image-making remains possible.
