TEACHING SERIES
Digital Images in the Era of AI & Photorealistic Virtual Media: Critical Lenses on Emerging Creative Practices
Slide Deck from DPI 2023
In this post I am simply sharing the slide deck and giving a brief walkthrough from my presentation on Aug 16th at the Digital Pedagogies Institute’s annual conference, or DPI 2023. You can click on the image above to view or download the slide deck.
Since it may not be immediately apparent what the presentation narrative is, below is the abstract followed by a quick walkthrough of the slides:
Curriculum in photography must respond to emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence-based image generation and ultra high resolution photorealistic virtual media. For decades, ‘post photography’ has referred to the differences between digital and analog photography. Today, new technologies can produce images based on machine learning, neural networks and virtual environments of the kind used to produce video games, animation and virtual reality experiences.
These new ways of producing photographs dispense with physical cameras and their associated equipment — tripods, lights, studio spaces, diffusers and reflectors etc. — altogether. The creative possibilities are exciting and will revolutionize industry practices. At the same time, these new technologies create opportunities to bring critical pedagogies into focus as these tools open up theoretical conversations about the relationships between truth, reality and representation.
Photographs have historically been used to support claims of veracity based on their semiotic ‘indexical’ relationship to the spatio-temporal context in which they were taken. The ‘truth’ of such images can be traced back to the moment when they were captured by chemical reactions or digital sensors from actual light in a specific location and time.
Today, deep learning neural networks and machine learning algorithms generate photorealistic audiovisual media without physical traceback to original objects or events. Virtual media technologies use high resolution scans of objects, textures and environments using photogrammetry and other techniques.
These technologies produce new challenges to our concepts of reality and conventional evidential capacities of the ‘mechanical image’ classically described by Walter Benjamin. While these tools have legitimate use cases in the entertainment and creative industries, they also contribute to information disorder in the post-truth era.
These issues are addressed in the redesign of my digital photography course, reflected in the new title: Digital, Virtual and AI Photography. In my presentation I will discuss the rationale behind my course redesign. AI photography relies on prompt writing, which is a useful pedagogical tool supporting traditional learning aspects such as rehearsal and forced recall. AI prompt writing provides a way to revisit key course concepts by asking students to explore foundational photographic concepts in a fast, at home and no-cost way.
Virtual photography increases students’ digital literacy around 3D and immersive technologies, which are becoming more prominent in the digital mediascape. Today, commercial photography, film and television, for instance, increasingly implement virtual production methods, whereby live action actors or models are staged in front of backdrops that run virtual media generated by game engines.
Given the general social and cultural relevance of photography, the presentation should be of interest to practitioners across many disciplines.
Presentation Walkthrough
- Comparison of AI synthography versus virtual photography
- From prompt to AI photo
- From AI photo to AI video
- Strange AI artifacts (in Punchy Boys video)
- High resolution scans of objects, textures and environments for real-time rendering engines.
- Principles and applications of critical pedagogy
- RunwayML’s toolset (and platform dependency of new curricula that tries to keep up to date)
- Challenges
- Examples of my AI music videos
That should be all a reader needs to reconstruct the gist of my presentation! Many of the images in the slides are hyperlinks to click away and discover the embedded media if the topic interests you.
