Metanoia

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are shifting our understanding of the photographer as an image-maker. Algorithms increasingly shape how images are produced, perceived, and circulated, while billions of photographs stored in the cloud depend on vast physical infrastructures. Photography appears increasingly immaterial, yet its existence has never depended on more matter.

“Metanoia” approaches photography as a medium in constant transformation, an image whose identity shifts among that of a material object, a technological process, data, and spatial experience. The title derives from the Greek word ‘metanoia’, meaning a fundamental change in one’s way of thinking. Here, it refers to photography itself: a medium whose definition is destabilized by technological change.

Rather than asking where photography is heading, the project begins with a more fundamental question: what is photography now? A photograph can simultaneously exist as a chemical trace, physical object, computational image, digital file, dataset, or information stored within technological systems. These forms do not replace one another; they coexist and overlap, expanding what a photographic image can be.

The individual works examine these conditions from different perspectives. Cameras become both image-producing apparatuses and objects of observation; artificial intelligence generates images that are returned to physical photographic materials; the seemingly immaterial cloud is confronted with the architecture of data centers; and the traditionally flat photographic surface acquires depth, movement, and spatial presence. The image repeatedly crosses thresholds between the analog and the computational, the visible and the invisible.

Analog and instant processes play a central role. Polaroid film is not used nostalgically or in opposition to digital technologies, but as a physical means through which contemporary photography can be examined. Its significance lies in its singularity, irreproducibility, and instability. Within a visual ecosystem based on near-limitless reproduction and circulation, it exists simultaneously as image, original, and material object that continues to change over time.

This approach resonates with Vilém Flusser’s concept of the apparatus as a black box and the experimental photographer who attempts to expose and play against its program. In “Metanoia”, however, the apparatus extends beyond the camera to include algorithms, artificial intelligence, software, screens, networks, and the systems through which images are produced, circulated, and preserved.

As photography becomes increasingly computational, its apparent dematerialization reveals new forms of materiality. The cloud has architecture. Data requires energy, storage, and space. “Metanoia” therefore understands photography as an operative system of relations between image, material, technology, infrastructure, and perception, one that continually shifts the boundaries of what a photograph is and what it can become.

Ema Lančaričová took part in our Face-to-Face educational feedback program with Managing Editor Ilaria Sponda and Der Greif Studio Co-Founder Diana Poole. Lančaričová is also part of »Guest Room: Whitney Hubbs & Jermaine Francis«.