open call: ghost in the loop

This free open call marks the beginning of a new collaboration between The Photographers’ Gallery and Goethe-Institut London. Together, we seek to explore the cultural, societal, emotional, and aesthetic implications of creating art for — and with — machines. The resulting research and artworks will be presented on Unthinking Photography, our platform exploring photography's automated, networked life.

Through this open call and future discussions, workshops and opportunities, we hope to make visible and interrogate where this next generation of photography is situated, what form it takes and how its symbolism, data and networks reconfigure the visible worlds being built around us.

The opportunity is open to artists and collectives engaged in photography and visual practices.

We are particularly interested in proposals that consider:

• How cultural practices shift within computational environments

• How feedback loops shape artistic production

• The implications of making work for machine viewers

Proposals may address (but are not limited to) themes such as:

• Human-in-the-loop 

• Ghost in the machine

• Machinic audiences: artworks created for systems or non-human agents (e.g. social media bots, automation, digital twins, AI companions)

• Emotion detection and affective computing

• Anthropomorphic intelligence

• Synthetic cultures

• Training, reinforcement, or continuous learning systems

• Intersections between creativity and AI-driven infrastructures

• computation pipelines between creativity and other uses of AI

• Prompt engines 

• Geographical restrictions of knowledge and censored response

• Emerging aesthetics shaped by AI

• AI psychosis and machine hallucination

• Collective intelligence and distributed cognition

• Computation and data colonialism