Romantic

Romantic is playfully probing photographic clichés by setting up fake sunsets or starry nights in the studio. In a second stage, I ask AI to describe these pictures, curious to see if the machine is following the narration of the cheap fakes.

Romantic is dealing with the photographic cliché and how pictures from this visual range are read - how much emotion has to be offered to make pictures readable beyond their tangible content? Are pictures, which can be easily identified as fake, still capable of provoking a certain, wrong way to be read, if they are consistent, to a certain scope, with our visual experience?

The base for this project consists of simple photographic fakes, staged through classic photographic means - like for example a fake sunset or starry night. The resulting pictures contain disruptions which make it easy to debunk the content, like unrealistic constellations of the stars, apparent assembly of several visual layers or the like.

In a second step, these motifs are read and described by artificial Intelligence. Is A.I. able to follow a merely emotionally driven perception of the photographs or will it detect only the real, technical construction of the picture? Will a human viewer behave the same way or will she/he be able to read the set-up in a dialectical way - decode the fake and still understand the emotional assertion? Does AI, which is trained to deliver expectable, average results, work as the burning glass of the average human perception, does it adopt the pose of an emotionally driven awareness?

AI's answers to my pictures can be found in the captions.