E. Jentsch highlighted, as a prime example of the uncanny, the doubt as to whether an apparently animated being is truly alive, and conversely, whether an inanimate object is, in some way, animated. He illustrated this by referring to the unsettling impression evoked by wax figures, mechanical dolls, and automata […] such phenomena would evoke in us vague notions of automatic, mechanical processes that might be concealed beneath the usual picture of our lives.
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (1919)
In an interview for El País, Mario Klingemann asks: “Why would a machine want to make art? There’s a big difference between humans and machines, and that is that humans die. And this perspective leads us to do things that have meaning, whereas the machine doesn’t have that motivation.”
We could argue that the invention of photography, like artificial intelligence, provoked all kinds of reactions in the society of its time. While most were filled with curiosity, many voices rose against this discovery, seeing in it a macabre and crude art form that endangered the so-called “Fine Arts.”
Hippolyte Bayard (1801-1887) is considered one of the fathers of photography, alongside Nièpce, Daguerre, and Talbot, for his work on image fixation. For years, he tried to get the French government to purchase or subsidize his project to the same extent it had with the daguerreotype. Disillusioned, he wrote a letter of complaint to the government in 1840, accompanied by a photograph in which he appeared dead, drowned—a work considered the first “fake” or staged photograph in history.
Using a prompt provided to DALL-E 2—one of the most popular AIs for image creation based on descriptions—I generated 50 consecutive images emulating Bayard’s constructed self-portrait. I then materialized the work by creating a false negative, which I printed on glass, and a positive using one of the techniques employed by this photographer, salted paper.
The final piece, L’Homme Noyé, is a photographic series where both the negative and its corresponding positive share the spotlight, aiming to reflect on the concepts of “fake,” creativity, beauty, and the uncanny—what Sigmund Freud described as that which is familiar and foreign at the same time.
Who is the true author of these works, where the randomness of the machine created by man develops a form of chance that is as dark as it is sometimes beautiful?