Category Archives: Photography

Weronika Pawlak

MA Photography The Image & Electronic Arts

Safe Space

“Safe Space” is a combination of analogue portraits and images of landscapes created by the AI  algorithm gauGAN. The algorithm generates images based on drawings which I made listening to the young people describing spaces that make them feel safe and relaxed. 


The work was created as an attempt to understand human’s longing for a safe space that is often imagined as an ideal space, free from self-doubts and fears. After the past year, I had a lot of thoughts about escaping the situation in which we all found ourselves. Making “Safe Space” I was thinking about how we, as humans, deal with the necessity of feeling safe. My interlocutors often admit that sometimes a safe space means a very specific place for them, for instance, a secluded place, surrounded by trees and flowers. Sometimes they could find a safe space in daily life, within the city. The imagined places seem to be at the same attainable and unrealistic. The unrealistic human desire connects with an uncanny AI representation of the landscapes, which is a way to materialize and personalise these spaces. 


The landscapes generated by gauGan are combined with analogue portraits. The composition of a picture refers to classical XIX century paintings, which often showed a person with a landscape as a background. A melancholic, romantic atmosphere of longing for something combines with an unrealistic image created by the algorithm. Since the stereotypical thinking about AI is that it can create something in a better way than humans, I found the outcome, full of glitches and unrealistic shapes, quite comic. Because of its imperfection, it reminds me somehow of a human’s way of feeling.

THE PROCESS – PART I

I asked people to describe a landscape that could work as their „safe space”. Listening to their audio recordings, I drew a series of landscapes using an AI algorithm GauGAN.

THE PROCESS – PART II
The series of analogue photographs combine people and their AI landscapes. 

About Weronika

Weronika Pawlak is a visual artist and musician, born in Warsaw, Poland. Currently working on finishing MA in Photography: The Image
& Electronic Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London. She works with photography, video, installation and music. She often explores
some of the themes related to the relation between humans and nature, the post-capitalist world and escapism.

 

Hay Tung Yan

MA Photography The Image & Electronic Arts

Leaves

Nature is always an inseparable part of the Earth. It has been called the Mother Nature for a
long time in history. Leaf is one of the precious gifts given by the Mother Nature. They never
miss a year to carry on the cycle of death and rebirth, as every single life living in the planet
Earth do. How can we capture the beauty of trillions of leaves in a very limited time?
My creative works focus on using faux liquid emulsion technique to capture different

 forms of the leaves. I have made these image by transferring a slim film which hold the printing 

of leaves into water colour paper.

 

The body of work was inspired by the concept of fading and decay as a destiny of our life.
We always try hard to keep something we must have lost but is meaningful in our control.
Once the leaves fall down from the trees or plants, they gradually become dry and dull.
Water and nutrition leave them, vivid green colour no longer exist.
This would be the most fascinating moment of the leaves.

About Hay Tung Yan

Hay Tung Yan is a Hong Kong artist based in London, England. After finishing her
photography degree in Hong Kong, she started her master degree in Goldsmiths, University
of London. As an artist, she works in photography, media production and music.

Xu Qin

MA Photography The Image & Electronic Arts

fiction love

About the project

Calvino’s three novels are combined into a collection “Our Ancestors“. This project is inspired by one of Italo Calvino’s novels, The Baron in the Trees. Although the project wants to discuss the present and possible near future, but every second in the past are history.

 

The inspiration for the project comes from this novel, which is a fairy tale, a teenager who could not bear the worldly relationships and social interactions, left society and chose to live in the trees. And his love is separated by space, he is on the tree, and she is under the tree. (Cosimo and Violante)

 

If before this, I only occasionally read some people share their love or sex stories online, I think in the past and a half year, social distancing and all kinds of isolation have brought new changes to the intimate relationship between people with the help of the Internet.

 

Sometimes, I have a feeling that may be an illusion. Many people in the world are defined as single in the traditional sense. But it seems difficult for me to describe it more clearly. In my view, they have Un-real or online lovers. In terms of their own experience, they are actually in love or marriage. My feeling that may be an illusion makes me believe this would be a more common thing, and the intimate relationship of some people will be somewhat different from now. Like we say now that your lover is Pete? Or the Obi-Wan online?

About Xu Qin

Xu Qin is a Chinese artist who focuses on the narrative exploration of various current themes, and also is interested in the development and display of visual works. His works mainly cover his personal interests in the past, present and future, and he usually uses different media such as film, photography, installation and painting. He has recently started a new project, contemporary and concrete work on a certain intimacy mentioned in a novel by Itano Calvino. The concept from the novel is a mixture of personal observations of the present and explorations of the near future. This project is currently developing mainly in the form of photography.

Lucy Mudel

MA Digital Media – Image Making

biomorphic syntheses

biomorphic syntheses is created as a collaboration between the human image maker and machine learning image synthesis programs by training generative adversarial networks, including both styleGAN and artGAN. Renderings from these models are then used as assets in animation, reviving inanimate form to bring the appearance of life.

 

The project’s intention is to provoke a dialogue on how image makers can use digital programs as tools to enhance their artistic practice; as well as intending to illuminate the necessity of the creator’s input to generate the models themselves and new imagery.  At the beginning of the animation, one can see the actual visual outputs of the first steps of the artGAN learning what “surrealism” looks like. This work focuses on the idea of questioning organic design, concepts of novel being, animism, and interconnectedness of carbon systems in the forest mycorrhizal network as well as the digital network. This work creates a dialogue on carbon and pixel transfer, in both an environmental sense, data storage, and archiving.

 

This work is presented in a square format as both the styleGAN and artGAN output new images from transferred pixels of the inputted datasets using vector based square ratios. Deep learning systems also require a large amount of storage, subsequently requiring a great deal of energy. Presently this work has collectively required approximately 15 GB of storage. While it is difficult to measure the environmental impact of small scale deep learning models, training a single deep learning model can emit thousands of pounds of CO2 emissions.

About Lucy Mudel

Lucy is a multidisciplinary artist working in photography, animation, film, painting, metals and sound. Some of the themes her work often explores relate to mental states, surrealism, psychology, nature, folklore and mysticism. Lucy graduated with a bachelor’s of science in Psychology, with particular focus on mental health, perception, wildlife conservation, virtual reality, as well as human and nonhuman behavior.

 

Personal website 

Instagram 

Yiran Wang

MA Photography The Image & Electronic Arts

Animals or not in the zoo

This project is a discussion about the identity of animals in the zoo. Are they as landscapes? Or as sculptures? Or as living animals? Is there an answer in their eyes?

About Yiran
Yiran Wang is from China, and she is studying MA photography: the image and electronic arts in Goldsmiths. She cares about personal experience and the sustainability of life. Her main researches are graphic images and photographic images. The works are based on fine art and tend to observe and experiment.

Personal website: https://cutenoodles.wixsite.com/yiran

Ke Tao

MA Photography The Image & Electronic Arts

In this series, I combined everyday objects and my childhood memory together in order to convey a sense of memory and absence in the past. Each pair of image I created is simultaneously an extension from the past serve as a reminder of the ever-changing nature of memory and emotions—an unstable and profoundly unreliable process, as fragile as bubbles as complicated and garbled as tangles of wool.

 

About Ke Tao

Ke Tao, a photographer primarily working in the fashion industry and currently studying MA Photography at Goldsmiths. She uses photography as a means of self-expression – to identify with hidden qualities of her character, to observe the emotional expression, and to express her interpretation of the world.

 

Emily Yo

MA Photography The Image & Electronic Arts

Comeontreetrees, 2021

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Emily’s research and visual approach keen on the trees on the street, between survival and artificial trees of investigation on photography. Emily explores the relationship with the people who live around their garden- trees, flowers, and topiary-and about where she goes and what she’s looking for in her personal views. Emily likes people and objects with tales to be told and backgrounds she can get a glimpse of. She would like to create a lovely way of living in the present. Moreover, Her MA at Goldsmith’s studies led her to understand those stories behind images. She involves the thinking process of image-making. Her aim in these images is to discover artificial, artistic trees. How people shape/maintains their trees in the yard. The two neighbors compete with each other. On the other hand, she has been discovering how the trees are in different areas, and species survive in different seasons. She has been looking for the same trees in different seasons. These experiences made her feel like she is a part of these trees’ life, in the meantime, such as parents looking at their children.

About Emily

Since 2020 pandemic has been beginning. She has been thinking about what is essential things for her to approach and where she could go. Nowadays, all these things can be experienced virtually, meet up with family, friends, and pets. She has been trying to be creative; She read, watches movies, and draws a little. These things help her to stay home. 

 

In her works- comeontreetrees, which is the ongoing works of her studying MA photography. This series of works has taken over the past 40 weeks. It explores curiosity, streets and cultures, and how the trees communicate within the walls of the houses on the streets. These experiences have dug deeper into the trees every day, but she also realized that freed from the constraint of lockdown restriction. These trees are her lovely company. They have been through the fall, winter, spring, and now it is summer. She is looking at them as friends.

Maksymilian Hryniewicki

MA Photography The Image & Electronic Arts

“Eden”

The photographs and quotes from the interviews invite the viewer to the vibrant world of London allotments. This unusual green urban paradise is just a pretext for a discussion on mental health, ecology, politics, food, urbanization, searching for sense, and ways to rebuild a healthy relationship with the planet earth. Welcome to the Eden not yet lost.

Jiayu Cui

MA Photography The Image & Electronic Arts

[Happy Life 1998]

Do we feel the same happiness as we were children when we go through our family albums?
Do we remember what we like the most as we were children? This work explores my childhood memories, trying to remain the deeper innocent me. As I want to recall the memories, I am focusing on visiting the places where I used to go, even if they are abandoned. I combine the photographs of child-me and the places I took now by using collages. Also, I hand-draw some children illustrations on the works, and all the ideas come from my sketches while I was a child.

 

About Jiayu

An optimistic and confident student with solid theory and practice in the field of art and design after 6 years of studying experience, who has mastered photography-related computer skills and research skills with great interest in further education in fashion photography.

Rita Guo Cheng

MA Photography The Image & Electronic Arts

The Look(ing) Of Time:

A timespace-image ensemble

Video Installation: timespace-image 02

Video Installation: timespace-image 01

*This video contains dialogues

About this artwork 

 

This ensemble of the moving and still images invites the spectators to look, reflect on and experience different types of duration. The work intends to grasp the human and emotional connection through these durations; it also contemplates the temporal-spatial-image relationship exhibited via multiple telecommunicated surfaces.

 

With 2 years not being able to see each other in person due to Covid-19, the artist’s initial attempt was simply creating “covid portraits” of her parents via video chat with a Large Format analogue camera. In the process the artist was fascinated and sadly agonised by the still and moving images of the parents on various surfaces (print/digital), and how these digitised or mediated images are related to the “image” of them in the artist’s mind (or memories)? How do we experience and confront “surfaced” images from now and the past situated in a certain kind of temporal-spatial scenario/duration?  

 

The work here was produced and reproduced by multiple photographic apparatus and techniques – Large and Medium Format cameras, instant analogue photography (Polaroid), screenshots, darkroom printing etc…The process and the results prove to be somewhat a futile effort trying to break through the limitations of the surface-space and time. 

 

We are, at the same time, infinitely close and apart.

About Rita 

Rita (CHENG Guo), sometimes known as Neo Chugg the Photographer, is an daytime translator and all time image maker. She mainly works with analogue photography and moving images. Rita currently lives and works in London. 

You may have a glimpse fof her visual mindscape via Instagram (admittedly not the best channel) for now.

Her website will be live in the very near future:

http://ouchnegg.com/

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