The Image Research Network

The Project Echo toolkit was created to support art and design educators in addressing visual plagiarism in the creative classroom. Project Echo was designed to be a modular resource, partitioning complex moral and ethical issues into bite-sized topics. Each topic is presented in an easy-to-use lesson booklet, explicitly designed with art and design students in mind; these lessons are also supported by an accompanying activity booklet that engages students in discussion, critical thinking, and creative practice.

An echo can be described as a close parallel to an idea, and this notion inspired Project Echo’s visual language. Its use of concentric circles visually represents the repetition and reverberation of an echo. The toolkit was also designed to be friendly and approachable, given that the topic of visual plagiarism often tends not to be. The wordmark logo utilizes a highly legible, rounded sans serif typeface with a customized circular icon substituting the letter O, representing the cyclic rotation of ideas and creative concepts. The primary monochromatic colour palette provides a bold backdrop for a contrasting rainbow gradient juxtaposed against the strong black-and-white theme. These contrasting elements have been selected to appeal to a youthful and creative audience.

The printed toolkit was produced with high-quality materials utilizing various weights of RJ Paper’s maple bright stock for a functional, clean, matt finish. The kit contains an A6 Guidebook for educators and two bookmarks to divide the sections between the custom-sized Lesson booklets and the A3 (folded to A5) Activity booklets. As each lesson is completed, more lessons and activities can be added to the ring binder forming a reference collection to be utilized time and again.

Linking to this year’s theme, Project Echo aims to encourage a pathway for transformation, guiding us to acknowledge the nuances of creative fields and determine best practices that can adequately support designers in ethical, practice-based research. By providing aspiring creators with the right tools to critically analyse their creative choices through the lens of academic integrity, we ultimately empower them to thrive. Equally, by creating spaces for conversation and critical analysis surrounding the ethical use of images, this project can transform how students and educators navigate towards more ethical, creative practices.

Images from my project, The Death of You and Me, act as conjurings of memories. When we experience severe trauma, our memories get stored differently. When a normal memory happens, it gets stored in the hippocampus, which allows us to recall memories and tell a story later. Trauma memories don’t activate the hippocampus, which means that trauma doesn’t get stored as stories we can tell. Without the ability to use our words, we can’t properly access our memory. Small fragments of the trauma go unnamed and sink out of sight. Lost, these wordless memories become part of the unconscious. In January of 2019, I was drugged, abducted, and raped for nearly 6 hours. In 360 minutes, I was changed. It took 360 minutes to escape. Those minutes exist as mostly black holes in my mind. Memory is challenging when it’s been taken from you. My images begin to act as a way to change our memories and define who we are and what we have experienced. The images within this series question time, duration, and trust within ourselves. Can we trust those around us? Can we even trust our own memories? By using repetitive image motifs, I’m questioning my own traumatic reenactments. Our mind replays these flashes of time over and over again to try and “get it right”. How does our subconscious influence the images we make?

Danqi Cai's multimedia installation reminds us of images’ ever-present role in shaping our perceptions. It underscores how we navigate our lives from specific vantage points, where certain aspects remain visible while others remain concealed. Employing a blend of handmade papers and dynamic animations, this work revisits ancient Seal Script Chinese characters, appropriates instructional materials, and diagrammatic family portraits. It embarks on a journey through the artist's past education to deconstruct and reconstruct what it means to be a child.

This work employs a deepfake of Jacques Derrida trained on interviews and lectures, 'Derrida on Love and Being', 'Derrida on Deconstruction', and 'Derrida on Archive Fever in South Africa (August 1998)' sourced from YouTube. Deepfakes use AI and Machine Learning, specifically Deep Learning techniques to imagine what a young Derrida may have looked like and spoken 'I love you' based on the source interview footage and stock video footage of a young model in the likeness of Derrida. Representation through images, from the days of court portraiture to today's self-representation and curation on social media platforms within the attention economy, has always been and still is about power and agency. Over time, indexical image-making processes like photography and video were culturally imbued with a certain truth value. This dynamic regarding agency and truth is now complicated due to multimodal generative AI and large language models. Derrida's ideas of Deconstruction problematized the structure and meaning of text, therefore calling into question agency and authorship available through the medium of text. Not only are the same questions resurfacing about meaning of texts regarding the structure of large language models (next-token prediction), but also with the advent of generative AI (including multimodal ones), the same concerns can now be mapped onto images.

My project Field Notes is a series of photocollages sourced from archival images of the colonial Philippines. As a Filipino-American photographer and artist, I contemplate not only how the long shadow of colonization affects Filipino lives today, but also how colonial photography at the turn of the twentieth century cemented perceptions of the Philippines as a primitive society. My goal as an artist is to challenge the frameworks in which these images were made by reclaiming the photographic narrative. These images did not represent us, they created us – through the colonial gaze.

The Data Portrait images, or what I call ‘computational drawings,’ are part of a series of generative imagery that is created by the ephemeral and ubiquitous image data that we generate constantly of ourselves and others. This data is compiled in our lives, knowingly and unknowingly, throughout the day, and inevitably piling up over a given year. The system or custom software that makes the images was developed for an interactive video installation that utilizes custom software to create generative imagery in real time. For this series, images of people or myself (portrait photographs) are fed into the system which analyzes the image data in order to generate algorithms for visualizing the imagery. The camera, and the resulting portrait imagery that it creates, acts as a type of sensor where the light from the lens transforms light into our image – into data as pixels. These pixels are then evaluated based on certain properties of light and dark. This created data is transcoded into various systems of vectors, colors, soundwaves, and text. The piece transforms the picture plane into three dimensional space that creates a data visualization of a person’s imagery data. The series of still images taken from these data visualizations are titled Untitled (Data Portraits). These resulting printed images are created by computational processes which draw outputs of line, shape, and color based on data that is input into different drawing algorithms. Pixel data is mined from imagery and video and then translated into numerical data that is computed by different algorithms. These algorithms govern how line and color are generated by custom software. The resulting forms or ‘drawings’ are printed on canvas or matte paper with archival pigmented ink.

The motivation for the work lies in the process of taking data exhaust (in the form of images we capture of ourselves) and mapping this data into the drawing procedures that are executed by the machine or computer. The machine works within a set of instructions or a certain system of rules of which dictate how line and form get created through movement, color, and line. As we generate more and more data (and data exhaust), our data becomes an extension of our lived realities and the projections of self. Like photographs and films from the 19^th and 20^th centuries, our digital information and data are intended to guide or elucidate our understanding of the world. Though, through my work, I am interested in a different version of this relationship. That is, to what extent does our imagery and data affect the world, the environment that we experience, and that which we perceive as ‘real.’ Friedrich Kittler stated that “With numbers nothing is impossible…a total connection of all media on a digital base erases the notion of the medium itself. Instead of hooking up technologies to people, absolute knowledge can run as an endless loop.” This convergence of technical media highlighted by Kittler comes to fruition through the translation of computational systems to simulate our own cognitive systems – as we see with the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence. This scaffolding is realized at its core through the application of mathematics as a means for the control of nature (and natural processes). Through this work and my broader practice, image data is translated into numerical relationships that are expressed through line and color and are then ‘tuned’ by the machine. The resulting drawings become an improvisation – a representation of the machine’s algorithmic vision. In these ways, I’m interested in exploring such processes wherein the data, imagery, and media that we create reflects an evolving perception and understanding of our realities. Our technologies (and the images we create through them) are extensions of our minds an

Through the use of single element lenses this series investigates preconscious visual phenomena by emulating the aesthetic hypothetically experienced inside the human eye. The work highlights how photography, through the use of compound lenses, has falsely maintained the idea humans naturally encounter the visual world as sharp all over and with a flat plane of focus.

The process employed in this series attempts to partially remove the visual cortex’s role in perception and reveal an arc of focus that is dissimilar to the flat plane of focus shared by conscious perception and popular photography. In this regard, it is through a devolved and primitive photographic technique that the viewer is brought closer to the space where the physical world meets the physical self.

The power of the image to challenge, inform and transform cultural narratives has long been acknowledged. With the ability to transcend barriers of language and literacy, imagery can efficiently communicate complex and universally understood messages to a global audience, capturing attention, evoking emotions, and provoking activism and change, without the need for detailed written information.

‘Season’s Greetings’ is a set of 4 playful, secular Christmas card designs, created to update and offer greater diversity to the current seasonal offering in the West. Created using watercolour and CAD techniques, the cards depict Christmas characters who represent different ethnicities, ages, and body-types, to reflect the rich cultural diversity of Western society, including people who are underrepresented in the current Christmas card market. Revelling in the spirit of a contemporary Christmas, the characters are dressed up in the finest designer fashions to celebrate the decadence of the season: drinking champagne, pulling crackers, smoking, and enjoying a little retail therapy.

A series of photographs exploring the relationship between the owner, artwork and the domestic space. The work considers the owner’s relationship with a piece of art through concepts such as taste, design and most significantly, identity.

The focus of this year’s Image Conference is on the digital technology we use to present images of ourselves to the world. Since self-portraiture is not part of my current creative practice, whereas digital tools are, what I propose for the conference exhibition are not iconic images that represent me by resemblance, but indexical images that represent me through an existential relation, as their creator. As such, my proposal is interested less in image-as-product than image-as-process.

Perhaps reflecting recent developments in A-I, and creeping anxieties about the suddenly plausible scenario of robots taking over the world, the conference theme prompts reflection on our efforts to control digitally rendered images, and their power in turn to “control and transform us.” I think here of Victor Frankenstein’s creature; Victor conceives of it as human, but through the process of creation it ends up something other-, in some respects greater-, than-human. The narrative recounts a prolonged internecine struggle between Victor and his creation—with the latter ultimately gaining the upper hand as it systematically destroys Victor’s world.

But there is a moment in the story when the creature itself proposes an alternative: that Victor make it a mate with whom it can live in some remote part of South America. Though he initially agrees, Victor soon reneges on this pact, succumbing to unfounded fears that the creature will propagate a whole new species that will supplant humanity, even. The creature is a prodigy. But Victor, by refusing to continue his work, turns it into a monster.

Though I am as unsettled by recent technological advances as other artists, who fear these could make us all obsolete, at the same time I cannot deny the allure, the often astonishing and instructive utility, of digital tools in my own practice. The work I would contribute to the exhibition was originally conceived as a singular piece, a diagrammatic “recto verso” painting of human cells clustered together in a mass thick and dense enough to resemble living tissue. Sketching out a digital template for this piece became unusually protracted, something I first attributed to my own indecisiveness and lack of control over the process, but eventually realized was due more to the software I was using, which enabled me to organize and overlay a prodigious amount of imagery. The lines, shapes and colors of the cells themselves and their various organelles (nuclei, mitochondria, etc.) formed a welter of competing patterns coming in and out of focus, combining and separating, as I gazed into my computer screen. Finding this optical experience more and more compelling, my conception of what I was doing evolved. I started thinking of the piece itself as inherently volatile and permanently in process, and of its subject not just as cells, but as stem cells, with the ability to transform into other types of cells.

As the power of a stem cell is not in what it is but in what it has the potential to become, so I came to think of this work—the multifarious digital “master” I’d created—as a repository of endless iterations, any of which I could render, as I’d originally intended, in the form of what I call a “recto verso” painting—a lightweight transparent sheet of polyester film, painted on both sides, that hangs from a single attachment point at eye-level in open space. Mindful of possible limitations at the exhibition venue, I propose to display one of these recto verso paintings, along with a selection of smaller digital prints of other possible renderings, arranged on a wall in a row or grid (space permitting).

This project affirms the sort of negotiation with one’s creation that Victor fails to act on. It suggests a way that many artists, including myself, have chosen to move forward with technology: by continuing the work, engaging with our digital tools in what has the potential to become an extended, mutually transformational process.