Photographic perception and cognition in the age of generative media

Abstract

Photography inherited its compositional rules from painting, and computational photography, which has become increasingly prominent with the rise of digitalisation, has not brought anything new in terms of perception, since it reproduces the aesthetic model of classical photography. However, contemporary generative artificial intelligence is already showing a shift away from the previous regularities. If the photographic image is itself a cognitive structure (Sandström 2007), the strategies of human understanding in the creation of meaning in the interaction with the image can be interpreted as continuous feedback and data loop for the algorithms of generative systems. As a consequence, these systems are in principle increasingly accurate in depicting not only the basic (or even far beyond) characteristics of a photographic image, but also what exactly the viewer sees, looks at, or looks for in an image.

Nevertheless, the generative image remains haunting for the viewer, which stems from the curious phenomenon that the salient aspect during perception is often overridden by cognitive, motor response reactions (see Moshel et al. 2022). In my study, I seek to answer how this slippage or derailment can be tackled from the perspective of the perceiver, and within what theoretical and critical framework can the ways in which cognitive processes override primary perception be examined.