174 | 2026

KARINA NIMMERFALL

Prologue

There Is Nothing
There It’s February 2026. Daylight enters the window and unfurls across spare furnishings and artworks in a way some might call transparent. For many years, she couldn’t afford a studio. Not that it mattered. She has more in common with conceptual and postconceptual practices that employ preexisting images and text to materialize ideas. Don’t most people think of the “artist’s studio” as a physical space? Yet isn’t it also a question of a space of thought—the skeleton you hang stuff on? Didn’t someone once say that the only useful thing about a studio is that, after some time spent there, one might actual­ly begin to imagine something? An image, for example. To walk around in.

Faking Photographs
To begin with, there are questions of propriety. Why is a concrete floor, with two light sources and a neutral background, the appropriate arena for imaging mundane objects such as vases, soap bottles, plants, brushes, picture frames, books, lamps, and other décor (to name some of the objects “visualized” in the database of a prominent company specializing in high-quality 3D models, scenes, and textures)? Today, one can find 3D computer-graphic versions of almost anything in the world and add them instantly to an online shopping cart. Almost everything is reproducible. For her, these new ready-mades serve to generate an atmosphere where space (and reality?) could be imagined differently: undefined, movable, open. She is rearranging fragments—a process of discovery and construction caught between appropriation and representation, between the archive and the work of art. Her aim is to create an image that involves a continuing sense of a preexisting reality, yet also eludes representation. Aren’t ready-mades meant to spur the imagination?

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 174/2026, pp. 10–12.

KARINA NIMMERFALL

PROLOGUE

TAMARA TRODD

A Restoration

In the last minute of Elizabeth Price’s 18-minute, two-channel video projection A RESTORATION (2016), we see the computer-­generated image of an engraved Jacobean wine glass. First, it tips to the side, then it rolls and falls, for nine long seconds. Computer-­generated voices, speaking in unison, enter. “The bright sound of its arrival”—we hear glass smash—“marks a small sacrifice,” they say. There is silence and darkness for two seconds before the words “A RESTORATION” appear, in bright red capital letters, and the film ends. The question is posed of what is at stake in the “restoration” this film describes: Is it preservation or destruction? Or something in between?

Designed apparently to be preserved, the glass nevertheless, as this sequence points out, imagines the possibility of its own destruction. The breaking of the glass fulfills a potential inherent in the fragility of its material and delicacy of its form, as well as realizing the threat alluded to in the thematic content of its imagery, showing the fugitive King Charles II hiding in an oak tree. The destruction of his “perilous refuge,” as Price’s commentary terms it, is an action that could never be performed with the real object, a prized artifact in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Rather, it is computer generation, or CG, that enables the artist to stage and visualize an imaginative possibility of the object: actualizing something encoded within it, that otherwise could only remain forever latent and in-potential.

This use of CG is consistent with the way in which Price, in other films, using a variety of techniques, has sought to excavate and reveal the hidden potential of objects. In NIGHT OF THE WORLD (2023), for example, a sunken cargo of luxury cars is shown to have evolved consciousness during their long underwater stay, and, again via voice-generation software, begins to speak a text blended from their user manuals and the lyrics of pop songs stored on their hard drives. The confident assertions of comfort, speed, and control described in these songs and manuals take on ominous new meaning, as the cars move and glide through the water by themselves. Although Price’s videos are rooted in the photographically based, factual investigation and analysis of different objects and institutions, here, as more widely across her work, she uses computer-generated imagery and sound, alongside other techniques, to access deeper truths concerning our phantasmatic investments in them.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 174/2026, pp. 29–36.

LILIAN HABERER

On the Dual Movement and Liveness of Post-Digital Images

A nocturnal coastal landscape shows the outlines of hazy pile dwellings, houses, and jetties. Scattered light gleams from street lights and from illuminated windows reflecting in the water and revealing the contours of the shore line, boats, houses, or trees—and, above all, the lighter shades of gray of fine cloud formations in the night sky. They make up the majority of the image in the CinemaScope format and point to a light source outside the format. The vastness of the landscape scene requires the gaze to roam across the picture in order to comprehend the details. Lazy Bay (2015) is part of a series of synthetically generated black-and-white photographs by Canadi­­an artist Stan Douglas. The large-format chromogenic prints on Dibond reconstruct nighttime pictures of various districts and areas in and on the outskirts of Douglas’s home city of Vancouver around 1948 as Nocturnes, with historical references to its characteristics as well as to its infrastructural and urban changes.

On the coastline, which originally belonged to the land of the Indigenous Tsleil-Waututh Nation, a group of small cottages was constructed near the water in the 1940s. They were inhabited for the most part by squatters, including the novelist Malcolm Lowry and his partner, Margerie Bonner. In 1940, they built a place to live and to write, a place where Lowry would later compose his renowned novel Under the Volcano (1947), which deals with the political situation in Mexico following the traumas of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. For his story, characterized by language and rhythm, Lowry also worked with cinematic stylistic devices of narration and political perspectives.¹ The visual imagery of Lazy Bay operates in a similar way: On the one hand, the panoramic vastness, the staggering of individual scenes, and their richness of details make one think of historical depictions and dispositifs, for instance, of landscape paintings, dioramas, or—as a result of the nuances in black and white—of the mise-en-scène of early cinema. On the other, precision and sharpness, as well as the possibility to perceptively “zoom into” the picture without any loss of image or detail quality, suggest a high-definition, synthetic representation—a reality modelled in 3D that was recreated from a historical reality using archival materials consisting of many individual images.²

1 “a political warning, a cryptogram, a preposterous movie, and a writing on the wall.” Malcolm Lowry, “Collected Letters,” p. 506, in Sarah Shute, ed., Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (Ann Arbor, 2002), p. 6 (unpublished comment on this volume). See also Miguel Mota and Paul Tiessen, eds., The 1940 Under the Volcano. A Critical Edition (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2015), p. LXV.

2 In the context of the Nocturnes, Stan Douglas developed the interactive AR app Circa 1948 in 2014, which makes it possible to explore virtually constructed historical locations and thus also zoom into them.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 174/2026, pp. 37–44.

SUSANNE ØSTBY SÆTHER

Rendered Futures: Ann Lislegaard's Synthetic Animations

Ann Lislegaard, born 1962, can be considered a pioneer in the artistic use of digital technologies in general and 3D animation in particular. Trained as a sculptor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in the early 1990s (where she also later became a professor in the new media department), she soon extended her sculptural practice into digital space, building objects, figures, spaces, and light inside a computer-generated environment. While her practice spans sound, photography, drawing, sculpture, and light, Lislegaard is arguably best known for her immersive video installations in which digital animation gives form to unstable worlds, animal-like creatures, and altered states of perception. In this sense, synthetic image-making is not a recent addition to Lislegaard’s practice but has been integral to it from the outset. Yet the artist’s work has never been primarily concerned with images’ indexical relation to the world, if by indexicality we mean the image’s direct physical connection to a referent. Rather, her work with synthetic imagery predates the current AI-image moment by decades, situating AI image generation as a recent development within a much longer history of computer-generated image production. For Lislegaard, however, the computer is not simply an image-making tool, but a means of constructing environments and temporali­ties that stretch our imaginative capacities. As Antonio Somaini, professor in film, media, and visual culture theory at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris and curator of the exhibition The World Through AI (first presented at Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2025) describes in an article in the journal October,¹ contemporary artists employing synthetic imagery and generative AI can be roughly grouped as either employing these tools to rectify biased histories and to fill in historical gaps of archival information, or to construct speculative future scenarios and worlds. Lislegaard’s practice clearly falls in the latter category.

1 Antonio Somaini, “Latent Spaces. AI, Art and the Meta-Archive,” in October No. 196 (Spring 2026).

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 174/2026, pp. 45–52.