Artificial Analog is an ongoing inquiry into the evolving landscape of image-making, where artificial intelligence and traditional photographic processes intersect. It began as a playful experiment—if I could photograph anything I wanted, what would I choose to capture? What started as an exploration of possibility soon became a deeper investigation into the nature of images, perception, and reality itself. Through a series of Instax prints generated from locally run AI models, this project examines questions of materiality, perception, and what it means for an image to be “real.”

Photography has always been shaped by technology. From early optical processes to the digital revolution, each leap has redefined how images are created, circulated, and perceived. Now, with artificial intelligence, we are entering another transformation: images no longer require light, a subject, or even a camera. Instead, they emerge from data, algorithms, and training models - generated rather than captured.

Artificial Analog explores this shift, examining what it means for an image to exist, be perceived, and take on material form. Using locally run AI models and workflows, I generate “photographs” that are then printed onto Fujifilm Instax Square film—a medium traditionally tied to immediacy, memory, and nostalgia. This process raises questions about how an image’s physical form affects our perception of its authenticity, meaning, and presence.

Photography has long been associated with truth, memory, and documentation, even as digital manipulation and computational photography have blurred the boundaries between what is captured and what is constructed. AI accelerates this uncertainty, generating images that have no direct reference in the physical world. Yet, once printed, they take on a new status - they can be held, misplaced, or fade over time. An image that originated as pure computation, with no physical counterpoint, is now bound to the imperfections and constraints of instant film. Unlike a digital file, a physical print has fixed dimensions and material limitations. The act of printing forces a commitment: this version, in this moment, is the one that exists. Does this tangibility make them more “real”? How does their physical presence shift our perception of them?

We readily accept a “willing suspension of disbelief” when looking at fictional imagery in cinema or advertising, yet AI-generated images often carry a different kind of skepticism - an inherent bias against their validity. Artificial Analog plays with this tension, bridging the gap between synthetic and physical, digital and analog, artificial and real. It raises questions rather than seeking definitive answers, investigating how images and tangibility function in a world where reality, fiction, and machine-generated vision are increasingly entangled.

This project has been exhibited at Eyemyth Festival 2025.