An emotional dialogue with A.I. The medium photography is broadly positioned, and many players out of a wide range of aspiration add content to a partly uniform mass of images. Now a new protagonist has entered the scene: Generative A.., which is built around the

interface between visuals and words. This is similar to a basic model for understanding we use when we look at a picture: trying to recognise forms and structures and then naming them. This process to connect images and words we have been training since childhood, when we were looking up to clouds in the summer sky, trying to identify animals

and heads within them and tell our friends. My project „Romantic" is based on this visuals-words interface as well. It deals with the photographic cliche and the way how pictures from this visual range are read - how much emotion has to be offered in order to make pictures readable beyond their tangible content? Are pictures that can be easily identified as fake still capable of provoking a certain, wrong way to be read, if they are consistent - to a

certain extent - with our visual experience? The starting point for this project are simple photographic fakes, staged by classic photographic means - like for example a fake sunset, rebuilt with a rubber ball, or a starry night, mimicked by a print on paper with cut-out holes. The resulting pictures contain disruptions and blurs which make it easy to debunk the content, like for example unrealistic constellations of the stars, apparent assembly of

several objective 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 A.I., 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? Finally the whole project was translated into a „paper-machine" based on the

simple technique of turning pages, a.k.a. a book.

ME: „Can A.l. get emotional?" CHAT GPT: „While Al can convincingly mimic emotions or respond in emotionally appropriate ways, it does not actually experience emotions. Emotional states are linked to consciousness, physical experiences, and neural processes that Al does not have. Any appearance of emotion in Al is simulated and designed to enhance

human interaction, but it remains a functional, non-sentient process."

million books

romantic

by Jens Masmann

40 pages 28/22cm

softcover with attached picture, one fold out, metal screw binding

signed

40 euros plus postage    info