Speculative Cyanotype Impressions

This series is of speculative algae, AI-prompted through references to Anna Atkins, and is transformed into hand-made cyanotypes, exploring how analogue and digital photographic systems coexist through material, environmental and computational relations.

This ongoing series reimagines Anna Atkins’ cyanotype studies of algae within a contemporary constellation of systems, where analogue, digital, human and environmental processes operate as distinct yet interconnected islands of making.

The algae imagery is generated by an AI generative model prompted with terms such as “photogram,” “algae” and “Anna Atkins,” producing speculative botanical forms shaped by means of computational interpretation rather than physical indexical inscription. These AI-generated images are translated into photographic negatives, then exposed to UV light to produce unique cyanotypes on hand-torn watercolour paper.

Within the ARCHIPELAGO framework, the work could be included as a reflection on crisis, not as rupture alone, but as a condition for new forms of coexistence between systems to form.

If reproduced for exhibition, the cyanotypes could undergo further translation informed by the exhibition context (reproduction and scale, also cropping into the blue edges of the paper), extending the work’s movement between analogue and digital systems and revealing the persistence and liveliness of photographic matter as it moves across changing material states.

Of interest to me is that the series of works considers how historical photographic processes and contemporary AI might form a distributed ecology of making, in which agency emerges through the relational interconnection of humans, technologies, environmental forces, and responsive photographic matter. It is ultimately an exploration of how we might all coexist together.