Plate XX: A Proposal or The Pencil of our Nature

12.3.2026

Täglich können wir beobachten, wie Bilder, die mithilfe Künstlicher Intelligenz generiert wurden, auch auf unseren Umgang mit der Fotografie einwirken. Von der Produktion bis zum Gebrauch wandeln sich die fotografischen Praktiken – und mit ihnen auch das Verständnis davon, was eine Fotografie zeigt und ist. Im Rahmen des Seminars »The Pencil of Nature, 1844–2026«, geleitet von Steffen Siegel, haben Studierende im B.A. Fotografie im Wintersemester 2025/2026 diese Fragen diskutiert. Ganz nach dem Vorbild von William Henry Fox Talbots berühmten Fotobuch haben sie eine eigene Tafel entworfen, die sich mit den Herausforderungen der Künstlichen Intelligenz auseinandersetzt. Lennart Pimpl studiert seit 2021 im B.A. Fotografie an der Folkwang Universität der Künste. Hier ist sein Beitrag.

To the reader is presented a fine specimen of the new art of image generation by artificial intelligence. With the prospects of continuing practice invested in its genesis, this here—by now arguably adolescent—process of image-making, born from the desire to replicate those, even to us, most fascinating secrets of the neural world, will—by time and collective effort—succeed in convincing us with the same enchanting virtue with which the photographic art hath held us captivated for almost two centuries now, of the realness and authenticity of its products.

The prompters of these computed surfaces, aided by the properties of the 14th element, will no longer remind us of poikilotherms, servants to the sun, but will strike us as architects constructing from our very subconscious itself. This technique shifts back into a space where its relation to the world is, like all ages before the invention of the fixed photograph by the likes of Niépce, Daguerre, Mrs Atkins, and the well-known Mr Talbot, not directly indexical.

In this respect the hasty reader might cavil that this change is not particularly significant. And he would be right. Yet much to the surprise of this ordinary spectator, after sufficient consideration he would find that, however charming its products may appear, their existence alone will force us to examine anew the assertions the process declares and intensify our ongoing discussions about the forces at play between the image and our perception.

So please let me have your attention and follow me for the remainder of this brief and humble contribution. Where does the world end and where does our imagination begin? In our heads everything we perceive is assembled to the world we know. Every image unhorsed by our classification of its realness has an equivalent projection delineated in our mind. To us this is its meaning.

What if we could project our innermost thoughts, ideas, memories, and even feelings, by learning a detailed language, outwards again onto an image surface and reference the world and our entanglement with it, rid of the boundaries of space, time, and the obvious habitual logics of yesterday’s images.