Fotoğraf Tarihçisi, Küratör, Editör / Photography Historian, Curator, Editor
MACARİSTAN / HUNGARY
Head of the Historical Photo Department at the Hungarian National Museum, Budapest
fisli.eva@hnm.hu
Eva Fisli, Budapeşte'deki Eötvös Üniversitesi'nde (ELTE) Tarih ve Edebiyat bölümünden mezun oldu. 2012 yılında Sciences Po Paris ve ELTE Budapeşte'de doktora derecesi aldı. 2005-2009 yılları arasında Macaristan Ulusal Müzesi'nde kayıt ve sergi koordinatörü olarak çalıştı. 2009 yılından bu yana Müze'nin Tarihi Fotoğraf Bölümü'nde sergi küratörü olarak çalışmaktadır. Eylül 2024'ten beri bölüm başkanıdır. 2012-2018 yılları arasında Macar Fotoğraf Tarihi Derneği'nin sekreterliğini ve web sitesinin editörlüğünü yaptı (www.mafot.hu). Fényképtárgy / Material Photograpy adlı iki dilli kitabın ve kadın fotoğrafçılar hakkında Macarca bir konferans kitabı olan Fotográfusnők'ün (2020) editörlüğünü yaptı. 2024 yılında, Macar Ulusal Müzesi tarafından düzenlenen André Kertész 130 sergisinin küratörlüğünü yaptı. Şimdilerde görsel anlatılar, fotoğraf kitapları, hibrit çalışmalar (analog ve dijitalin karşılaşması) ile ilgileniyor.
Bu sunumda, maddi fotoğraflar ve çevrimdışı gerçekliklerle değişen ilişkilerimiz hakkında sorular sormak istiyorum. Genç bir Macar sanatçı olan Levente Ákos'un, botanikçi ve sanal bir Avrupa ülkesinin vatandaşı olan D Uedd Udd adlı bir adamı yaratmak için Yapay Zekâ (DALL-E) ile işbirliği yaparak, eski özel fotoğraflardan oluşan Yapay Arşivini (2022-2023) nasıl oluşturduğunu inceleyeceğim. Udd, 1943 yılında, İkinci Dünya Savaşı'na giren Blajssoane'ın bir askeri olarak öldü. Dul eşi, daha sonra, Ákos tarafından bir bit pazarında bulunacak olan bir fotoğraf albümü derledi.
Fantezi ve gerçekliğin harmanlanmasından bahsederken, projenin 20. yüzyıl Arjantinli yazarı Jorge Luis Borges'in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius adlı kısa öyküsüyle birlikte okunabileceğini savunacağım. Borges hikayesinin, çağdaş bir sanatçının görsel bir biyografinin şemalarını ortaya çıkarmak ve geçmişe dair kişisel ve kolektif anlatılarımızın kalıplarını sorgulamak için icat ettiği bu fotoğrafik aldatmacayla ilişkilendirilebileceğini göstereceğim.
Yapay Zekâ, Borges, Karma ve Çapraz Gerçeklik, Sanallık
In this presentation I would like to raise questions about our changing relationships with material photographs and offline realities.
I will examine how Levente Ákos, a young Hungarian artist constructed his Artificial Archive of old private photos (2022-2023) while collaborating with Artificial Intelligence (DALL-E) to create a man called D Uedd Udd, a botanist and citizen of a virtual European country. Udd died as a soldier of Blajssoane, which entered World War II in 1943. His widow compiled a photographic album that was later found by Ákos at a flea market.
Speaking about the blend of fantasy and reality, I will argue that the project can be read together with Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, a short story by the 20th-century Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. I will demonstrate that the Borgesian story can be related to this photographic hoax invented by a contemporary artist to reveal the schemas of a visual biography and to question the patterns of our personal and collective narratives of the past.
Artificial Intelligence, Borges, Mixed & Cross reality, Virtuality
I
Just ten years ago, in the depths of the darkroom, lifting the two edges of the photographic paper, I swung a transparent plastic cup filled with coloured pieces of paper. I let it go, it slowed down, swayed with ever decreasing amplitude, and then I made the exposure. All I wanted to do was to make visible the contents invisible to the naked eye.
The exposure suspended the movement in each image. In one of them, the body of the cup splits in two due to the speed, in another, the strange interstellar geometry of the coloured pieces of paper is revealed for a moment, and in the third, a figure resembling a living being emerges in a translucent shell through the colour transitions.
Thanks to the encounter of predictability and chance, the recorded spectacle in each case came from beyond human perception. I photographed something that I had not seen, only imagined and later tried to decipher.
This is the magic of cameraless photography. By creating a specific spatial situation, I renounced the display possibilities and limitations imposed by lens-based photography, but I still insisted on the imprints of the objects.
The creation of the “phase photograms” was significant for me, because creating them had an impact on my thinking. (The questions of what makes an image authentic, or what is the relationship between “reality” and photographs came later.)
However, the changing ways of visual representation and photographic image-making have had an irrevocable impact on the perception of reality of us all, whether microscopically or telescopically, or even through photograms (etc.). But our perception, already permeated by images and the industrialization of vision (by market-leading analogue and digital formats, algorithms, and trends), also affects the reality we experience. In this world flooded with images, can we (still) speak of a mere duality of real and fake photographs?
II
The Argentine writer Borges' text Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius focuses on the mirror, mirroring, reproduction and, of course, the power of language (and imagination) to create the world. The first-person narrator happens to come across a description of a fictional country in Asia Minor, Uqbar, in a pirated encyclopaedia, the tenth reprint of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Not only does he gain knowledge of its approximate and deliberately obscure geography, but he also learns „that the literature of Uqbar was one of fantasy and that its epics and legends never referred to reality, but to the two imaginary regions of Mlejnas and Tlön.” (Borges, 1940)
The Borgesian storytelling then switches, after a few jumps, to a description of Tlön. However, volume 11 of the 1001 (!) pages of the First Encyclopaedia of Tlön, found by chance, is no longer “a superficial description of a nonexistent country”, but “a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet's entire history”. (Borges, 1940)
The Postscript to the text written in 1940, dated 7 years later, reveals that generations of secret tlönist scholars have been working on lexicons describing Orbis Tertius. And the imagined idealistic and orderly world is increasingly intruding into the real one. Its orderliness makes this "labyrinth devised by men" (Borges, 1940) extremely attractive in contrast to a reality that is governed by divine (i.e. inhuman, therefore incomprehensible) laws.
However, the narrator's fascination turns into a cold and helpless aloofness at the end of the postscript. For humanity, enchanted by the rigor of Tlön, forgets repeatedly „that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels.” (Borges, 1940)
And the imagined world is already there in brains, in looks, in gestures, in the rewriting of the past, in words and in dreams. Borges's disillusioned narrator opens the door to a fictional world that expands ever wider, penetrates reality and then devours it.
“If our forecasts are not in error, a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön,” writes the narrator at the end. “Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe. The world will be Tlön.” (Borges, 1940).
If my forecast is not in error, we will be in 2040 then.
III
During 2022-2023, the young Hungarian artist Levente Ákos created a photographic album dedicated to a man called D Uedd Udd. He used 74 gelatin silver contact prints and a newspaper article written in an unknown language as the basis for his work, all of which he generated using artificial intelligence. He wanted to understand "how the meaning and deceptive nature of artificially generated images change or are amplified depending on the medium and context. Is a form (family album, photographic paper) alone that we are collectively able to relate to and believe to be real enough to make both the fictional photographs and the fictional story real?" (Ákos, 2023)
According to the story told by the artist, the widow of a young botanist from Blajssoane who died in World War II is the actual compiler of the album found at a flea market. She selected and arranged the pictures one after the other. However, the particularly foreign-sounding names of people and places arouse suspicion in the viewer of the album. And not without reason: the story told by the artist is entirely fictitious, “the photographs and the album were not compiled by Dorirs Aiusy, who never existed, just like D Uedd Udd and Blajssoane.” (Ákos, 2023)
In other words, it is an existing photographic album compiled by the non-existent wife of a non-existent man that creates the Republic of Blajssoane itself. Generated from the artist's prompts and then manually aged by him, the photographic album is ultimately a homage to Borges and a strange mirror. Through it, Ákos points out the visual patterns that pervade our reality and our life stories, the 'ordinary' stories, the common denominator between individual lives documented by archival photographs. And if we look at the AI-generated images as representations of (one of) the models of the world represented by photographs (i.e. not a mixture or montage of „real” photos, but something else that is created during the generation process), it may seem that we are dealing with the purest simulacrum (Wasilievski, 2024).
And while Ákos mirrors our globe into a possible other, imagined world, his work also raises many other questions. What can a photographic album as a narrative even tell us? What is the role of omissions, silences, missing images within it? If we don't know the characters, what do the family photos taken of them, placed one after the other, and considered important by them tell us? Are we able to look at them independently of our own prejudices, our learned vision? What are the stories made of? Who compiled or narrate them and why?
IV
On one day in November 2023, our Photokick [1] workshop at the Hungarian National Museum brought together archival, tangible photo albums and AI-generated images, including a presentation of Ákos' project. The whole programme was aimed at secondary school teachers, starting with questions such as "What are the roots of prompt and promptography? How can AI be used in teaching? How can it be exploited, for example, in teaching language, literature, history, and geography? What can it do in the hands of contemporary artists? What is the difference between an archival and a fictional photographic album?" (Photokick, 2023)
In the first half of the workshop, we, the curators, gave examples of manipulation techniques that existed in analogue photography, and spoke about the patterns that can be found in 20th century family albums when we flip through them as historians. In the second half of the day, looking at the photo album dedicated to the love of a woman in Blajssoane, we tried to pinpoint the flaws of AI-generated images and to spot their virtues. The artificially aged fictitious photos, placed in the body of an old album, had not yet fooled us, but we could already guess that they might soon bear a striking resemblance to photographs.
I was enchanted, I can tell you. And yet, I can only think that the faster the world coming to life from our prompts crawls into our brains, the more important it is to critically examine old photographs.
[1] https://photokick.eu/ Accessed 21 March 2025. The project running in 2022-24 included an international photo competition with a subcategory entitled Imagined Cities, specifically for AI-generated images.
References
Ákos, L. (2023). „A történet teljes egészében igaz, mert elejétől végig én találtam ki” – ln Memoriam D Uedd Udd – Mesterséges Archívum (2022–2023) www.punkt.hu, 03.09.2023., https://punkt.hu/2023/09/03/a-to%CC%88rtenet-teljes-egeszeben-igaz-mert-elejeto%CC%8Bl-vegig-en-talaltam-ki-ln-memoriam-d-uedd-udd-mesterseges-arc/ punkt Accessed 20 March 2025 Borges, J.L. Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius (Sur, May 1940,
English translation by James E. Irby, 1961) Photokick, (2023). Photokick-élménynap https://mnm.hu/hu/esemenyek/muzeumi-elet/photokick-elmenynap mnm.hu Accessed 21 March 2025
Wasilievski, A. (2024). The Latent Objective World. Photography and the Real after Generative AI In Shobeiri, A. and Westgeest, H. (eds.) Virtual Photography, Artificial Intelligence, In-game, and Extended Reality, 2024, transcript Verlag, Bielefeld https://www.transcript-publishing.com/978-3-8376-7203-9/virtual-photography/?c=411000190 Accessed 21 March 2025
Eva Fisli graduated in History and Literature at Eötvös University (ELTE), Budapest. In 2012 she obtained a PhD at Sciences Po Paris and ELTE Budapest. Between 2005 and 2009 she was a registrar and an exhibition coordinator at the Hungarian National Museum. Since 2009 she has been working at the Historical Photo Department of the Museum as a curator of exhibits. Since September 2024 she is the head of department.
From 2012 to 2018 she was the secretary of the Hungarian Society for the History of Photography and editor of its website (www.mafot.hu). She edited the bilingual volume of Fényképtárgy / Material photograph, and Fotográfusnők, a Hungarian conference book about women photographers (2020). In 2024 she was the curator of André Kertész 130, a series of exhibitions organized by the Hungarian National Museum. She is currently interested in visual narratives, photobooks, hybrid works (encounters of analogue and digital.)