Presentations

As more advanced text-to-image generators like DALL-E, Midjourney, and ChatGPT enter the public sphere, they have felt, to many users, like impressive magic tricks. These new forms of image recognition and production feel so mysterious in part because the processes behind them are fairly obscure to the general public—and even to the technology’s developers. But image-making technologies from their inception have had the capacity (and tendency) to manipulate perception.

What kind of visual tricks have photographs performed in the past? Where in photographic history can we find the precursors and relatives of synthography? How and why do photographers use play, deception, and imagination to bend, expand, question, and expose truth(s)? Using several examples from the Morgan Library’s photography collection, I explore visual manipulation through a variety of photographic techniques—distortion, montage, apparition—gesturing to the ways these operations also shape and inform AI-powered image generators.

Ultimately, I believe that synthography is not a break with photography, but an evolution in image-making which has compounded, consolidated, and more deftly invisibilized its “tricks” in ways that currently overwhelm and confuse us. Reframing photography’s history as a history of illusion—and artificial intelligence as a new chapter in that story—might better prepare us to face the more pressing threats of these technologies, demystifying some of their “magic” and encouraging us all to trust our judgement more than we trust images in the first place.

Presented at:
How AI is Changing Art and the Humanities, and To What Ends, Art Science Connect Symposium, CUNY (NY, NY), 2024

Climate change games have proliferated in recent years, often with the goal of educating the public about the stakes of ignoring a warming planet. Most operate like a version of Model UN, where powerful politicians and leading scientists negotiate Earth’s future. Many treat ecological disaster as a sudden, dramatic event that is either utterly devastating or can be “won” with the right technology. Not many address climate change as gradual, already happening, and deeply grievable. Few feel centered on how the rest of us will experience it or already are.

Last year I participated in Speculating the Environment, a Pratt Institute workshop that convened scientists, writers, and artists working on climate change in their professional and creative practices. Through it, I designed a collaborative storytelling game called The Disappearing, which sets players in a fictional world where things are vanishing mysteriously. The game prompts participants to imagine how they and others respond to these profound changes, emotionally and practically. The game is played almost entirely asynchronously until the end, with each player inheriting the choices made by previous players.

Drawing on writers and scholars like Donna Haraway, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Rebecca Solnit as well as hands-on research playing a variety of games, I will critique the landscape of current climate change games, present some of the (mostly non-climate- themed) games that inspired me, and over my own game as a collaborative invitation and experimentation—an attempt at “playing with the trouble," so to speak.

Presented at:
The Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) Conference (virtual), 2024
Bridging Horizons: Exploring Graduate Research, English Student Association, CUNY (NY, NY), 2024

In the summer of 2020, thousands of demonstrators chanted “hands up, don’t shoot” during the wave of Black Lives Matter protests that swept across the United States in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police. The plea “don’t shoot” was also directed at another audience: news photographers. Protesters asked that photojournalists grant them anonymity in images or not photograph them at all, citing the use of news images by police to surveil, arrest, and inflict harm on demonstrators. At the same time, Black photographers frustrated by structural inequalities in the photojournalism industry called on White photographers to “not shoot,” and instead advocate that their colleagues of color be paid to document this critical moment for the BLM movement.

For many photographers, these were difficult requests to process. Internal feuds over journalistic ethics and visual representation raged online and offline. As a freelance photojournalist in New York City at the time, I was embedded in many of these spaces and catalogued the arguments, trying to understand and deconstruct them. In this paper, I turn to photographs of photographers, rather than demonstrators, during the 2020 protests to illuminate the positionality of the photojournalist—especially the White photojournalist. In addition to a close reading of these images, I employ a combination of media history, visual theory, and personal reflection to interrogate insider/outsider relationships and power dynamics between press, protesters, and police, as well as their implications for the future of protest documentation.

Presented at:
Crisis & The Everyday, University of Pittsburgh Film & Media Studies Graduate Student Conference (Pittsburgh, PA), 2024