Garrett Lynch IRL & Frédérique Santune

Image/Object (2026) is a series of eighty post-photographic works that each explore ideas of subject-object relation in philosophy and photography theory. Within the context of AI art they develop the relationship between image and object post conceptual art and post-internet art.

Drawings by artists Frédérique Santune and Garrett Lynch IRL, accompanied by text, are employed as prompts in a latent diffusion model. The model creates improbable or impossible photographic objects that combine the apparatus, media and means of presentation of photography. A newer generation diffusion model, with different/improved qualities of simulating photographic realism, is then applied to these generated objects. It positions them in photo-realistic renderings of a contemporary art gallery, the conventional space for art objects.

In this process, the drawings function as a means of outlining the objects, their form and position, while the text contextualises them to group them as a photographic subject. Drawings and language are folded from ‘real’ to latent space and finally to a simulation of ‘real’ space. The resulting objects are a synthesised hallucination of subject and object in photography. The photo-realistic exhibition space, in which the objects are presented, provides a contrast to the objects’ level of realism and highlights their impossibility. The objects appear unreal, sometimes flat, like cutouts of objects and without realistic lighting or shadows. Sometimes they cast shadows, reflections or create a perspective that is in opposition to the exhibition space they occupy. At other times, they merge with the exhibition space by allowing the edges of what appear to be printed photographs to be permeable. Objects represented in the printed photographs overflow into the space, and vice versa, the space sometimes becomes a part of the printed photographs.

Levels of representation, the result of employing combinations of different generations of diffusion models, are purposefully made apparent in Image/Object. These meta-representations and the resulting new objects create a loss of indexicality to original objects and their spaces. The new objects are similar to un-objects or non-objects in philosophy, objects that resist objectification. Understood as post-photographic objects, they are both not and more than objects. Extending beyond conceptual art’s dematerialization of art as idea (post-object) and post-internet art’s dispersed hybridisation of image and object (image-object), the post-photographic object in AI art, in large part a post-photographic practice, is a probabilistic artefact. The result of a mean average of the ten million photographic apparatus, media and means of presentation seen by the model.