Imaginary Times: Temporal Dimensions in Virtual Photography in and through Artistic Practice, Research and Teaching
In this session, Katrin Korfmann discusses the connection between her artistic practice, research, and teaching and shares her insights on preparing for a PhD in and through art/design.
Living in a time of visual acceleration, pictures processed by machines design communities and redefine the perceptions of the world. Photography in the era of virtual societies, machine learning, and AI no longer represents time but controls and fabricates its visualisation through image creation. By engaging with artistic research, photographing, image processing, and publishing, ‘Imaginary Times’ endeavours to examine and gain knowledge about the relationship between today’s photo technology and the creation, depiction, and perception of temporality in pictures.
Considering photographic time other than just exposure time, this artistic research is investigating the current relationship of time and the photographic and is searching for present-day temporal concepts of picturing in:
- The ‘temporality of making’, namely the photographic practice and photographic technology; such as continuum of production, composite time, algorithmic training time.
- The ‘temporality of representing’, specifically in the image or code; for example bended time, asynchronous and multitemporal time.
- And the ‘temporality of experiencing’, manifested in the viewer or interpreter’s interpretation; considering passage of time during cognition and navigation.
As photography arose with modernity, where technology accelerated speed and enabled photography to stop time, this research project asks what photographic temporality means in the age of machine learning, where the speed of optical mechanical photography is replaced by digital real-time and the photographic appears as algorithmically driven code representing navigable imagery in multiple perspectives.
