Expand and Contract: AI and Alternative Processes – In-Person Exhibition

Jun 12, 2025 – Aug 9, 2025

Expand and Contract: AI and Alternative Processes is an international group exhibition that features artists who turn to AI as part of their production process, and, at times, as a creative generator that expands the scope of conceptual experimentations.

Exhibiting Artists

Aurora Wilder (Jennifer Pritchard, Patrick Corrigan and Dall-E), Dana Bell, Adam Chin, Ann Cutting, Hillerbrand+Magsamen, Liron Kroll, Lev Manovich, Osceola Refetoff

Curator

Dr. Rotem Rozental, Los Angeles Center of Photography Executive Director and Chief Curator.

Opening Reception (In-Person)

Saturday, June 28, 2025, 3-5 pm RSVP HERE

Exhibition Run Dates (In-Person)

June 28, 2025 – August 9, 2025

Essays:

Dr. Lev Manovich, AI as a Memory Machine

On Natural Selection, AI and Inheritance: Dr. Rotem Rozental in Conversation with Aurora Wilder

About

Expand and Contract: AI and Alternative Processes posits that generative AI technologies could be considered as the most recent addition to the world of photographic alternative processes, alongside cyanotypes, daguerreotypes, or albumen prints. Perhaps we can think about it as our era’s version of cameraless photography. This international group exhibition features artists who turn to AI as part of their production process, and, at times, as a creative generator that expands the scope of conceptual experimentations.

Technological developments hasten pronouncements regarding the death of photography every few decades, with the most recent trigger being digital innovations, such as digital cameras and image editing software. And yet, photography persists. In fact, it continues to re-define how we engage with one another, imagine ourselves and our place in the world. Most recently, AI caused an uproar among visual practitioners, as machines have been trained to create images using images produced by humans who were not paid for services unknowingly provided. Moreover, AI seems to pose a threat to human agency.

As we wait for governments to sort the legal implication, perhaps we can focus on the human agency part: What if we flip that narrative? What if we think of AI as a tool, rather than a threat?

The participating artists have been exploring its capabilities from a variety of perspectives. AI allowed Liron Kroll to address gaps she identified in her childhood family album. Working with the likeness and voice of her children, she not only completed the past, but she also created unexpected documentation of the future. Media theorist and visual artist Lev Manovich uses AI to imagine what the past could never provide him: A model for an idea Soviet city in the 1960s (shown above), or a library of writings that were never created. For both, AI is a pathway to a past that could never be, but should have existed.

While Manovich and Kroll use the present to re-imagine the past, Adam Chin tries to capture a glimpse of the future. Chin’s strange, haunting portraits wonder about AI’s progression toward self-awareness. Chin used approximately 650 portraits of each subject to train AI to create new images, without providing textual prompts, hoping to also reveal how Conscious AI would visualize itself. The process generated about 8,000 images for each subject, and a strange mixture of gestures and body parts, of multiple images and unreconciled responses to the original inquiry. Will AI look like us? Will we become less human in our perception? Our appearance? Perhaps we do not yet have the tools to address these questions.

Jennifer Pritchard and Patrick Corrigan also consider the development of AI and AI generated images, by employing a conceptual framework that is driven by genetics. They formed a collective whose third member is Dall-E, with whom they created layered visual responses to evolving prompts about the human condition. In Inheritance, their most recent project, they focus on generating images that traces the unexpected routes of hereditary developments. Each image is another step in a visual progression; an evolutionary image-based chain with a perpetually undetermined endpoint.

Dana Bell also questions the relationships between human perception and AI intervention, utilizing the concepts behind AI, such as pattern recognition and prediction, to create three-dimensional pieces that are based on archival images. Bell highlights visual gestures and photographic memories. In her work, fleeting moments and connections are amplified, textured and layered, suggesting human presence might be reduced to patterns and predictable outcomes.

Mary Magsamen and Steophen Hillerbrand are a husband-and-wife team who have been working together for over 20 years. Their project begins with the aftermath of a natural disaster—with the debris that remained after a hurricane damaged their home in Houston, Texas. The wood, insulation materials and fragments of the structure of the house that remained were cut with a European bread cutting knife and scanned. With the help of AI, these materials became the building blocks of abstract images that physically use structural elements to reflect on domestic spaces and how they are impacted by the forces of nature.

Osceola Refetoff’s work also utilizes AI to visualize and explore our relationships with nature and climate change. In the video Sea of Change, the artist utilized AI-generated animation to envision the outcomes of climate change, based on original footage he captured while in Norway, near the North Pole, with a pinhole camera and drones, among other devices. In this case, AI is used to imagine the future and the consequences of our actions in the past and today, but without falling to despair—perhaps the ability to visualize the future can also direct us toward a different outcome, toward positive action rather than passive hopelessness. And perhaps that approach should also be turned toward our newfound lives with advanced technologies.

-Dr. Rotem Rozental