Photographing with the Muses

In “Photographing (with) the Muses,” Lauren Guilmette and Rob Leib evoke that ancient relationship to the muses in order to interrogate the meaning of photography as a means of image and meaning making. In fast-paced conversations among many philosophers and practitioners, from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel and Heidegger to Derrida and Sontag, they gather together insights from across history, situating these thoughts on a number of images of their own making. Alongside their original photographs are several images that were co-created with an Artificial Intelligence trained in neural style transfer, which is a process of combining the content of one image and the stylistic elements of a second one, producing something like a genetic offspring, one that humans still control for the time being. As this creation is a piecemeal, symbolic process, one that attempts to convey what perhaps only we can envision, or what we can only envision, Leib and Guilmette see themselves akin to muses to the non-human AI in this process. As such, they are envisioners, whose photographs float above the process of creation as myths to be produced and preserved in the dreams of the first AI artist partnerships.