AI: The End of the Lens? – Belgian artist and iconoclast Miska Henner to present at AI Symposium in Melbourne this month
A new Symposium on Sunday 17 March 2024, 11am-2.30pm, hosted by Australia’ s only specialist educational institution in photography and digital image will be held during PHOTO 2024 an International Festival of Photography held in Melbourne throughout March.
The Symposium will debate the hard questions about AI and the impact of the emergence of a constructed image that does not need a camera or a lens.
In 1840, when French painter Paul Delaroche saw his first photograph, he declared: “From today, painting is dead!”
And now in 2024, AI and images generated from text prompts raise similar cries of “Photography is dead!”
AI has arrived as a controversial technology just at the time when we have entered ‘The Age of The Image’ where visual images dominate human communication and social media.
The provocative Symposium explores whether photography IS dead? With AI developing a rate none of us can keep up with, is it the end of the lens?
Symposium keynote Miska Henner is no stranger to what authorship means in the visual arts. He has long explored all forms of imaging platforms, reconstructing found online imagery to subvert the viewers perception, the idea of ‘the author’ and to question ‘the value of photography in today’s media saturated world’. [1]
Ironically, the images emerging from the artificial intelligence visual generators (such as Midjourney, DALLE-E2 etc) are all drawn from immense data banks of photographic images and emerge at the mere suggestion of a human prompt.
But is it as simple as all that?
Is it the end – or another beginning?
What does AI mean for education in the visual arts and photography?
A panel of PSC staff and alumni photographers will address these questions. Workshops in using AI in photography and digital image generation form part of the symposium.
Join us face to face on campus at Photography Studies College, 37-47 Thistlethwaite Street South Melbourne VIC 3205 for a provocative keynote at 11am Sunday 17 March 2024 followed by presentations and a lively debate by photography educators, students and industry protagonists.
Live streaming available. To register for the event please follow this link: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/
