Katrin Korfmann is a PhDArts doctoral student at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA). Her project is titled 'Imaginary Times: Temporal Dimensions in Virtual Photography in and through Artistic Practice'.

More information about Katrin Korfmann

'Imaginary Times: Temporal Dimensions in Virtual Photography in and through Artistic Practice'

As modernity gave rise to photography, a time when technological development accelerated and photography could seemingly stop time (Beelden-Adams, 2010), ‘Imaginary Times’ examines the significance of photography’s temporality in the age of generative AI, in which traditional optical-mechanical photography is increasingly replaced by real-time digital processes and machine learning (Zylinska, 2023). Photographs today do more than just capture or represent time; they are often generated by algorithms that actively shape temporalities in the process of their creation (Dewdney, 2022). 
             
‘Imaginary Times’ investigates the relationship between contemporary photographic technologies and the creation, depiction, and perception of temporality in photography. Specifically, it focuses on photography that is not produced by one single snapshot but within continuous human-algorithmic co-composition processes that unsettle traditional linear concepts of time and create photographic spaces in which time is out of joint (Steyerl, 2012). This artistic research emphasises the urgency of a debate on the shifting indexicality and iconography of time in photography (Shobeiri, 2024); it demonstrates the medium’s transformation from the mechanical slicing of time to the synthetic curation and probabilistic prediction of times while searching for alternative photographic temporalities through the lenses of artistic practice, human imagination, and collective spaces (Azoulay, 2010). 
             
The following questions will be explored during the research trajectory: what do algorithmically driven photographs, specifically pictures composed with AI, do to modes of experiencing temporality, and can artistic research contribute to understanding this temporality and its visual appearance? If so, how can this understanding foster the development of an artistic practice rooted in photographic temporality that provides a framework for more human aspects in algorithmic photography, such as togetherness, craftsmanship, and collectivity?