“And indeed, the glass of the mirror was dissolving, melting away in Alice’s hands, as if it were a bright, silvery mist.
One moment more and Alice had passed through the glass and was lightly jumping into the looking-glass room. The first thing she did was to see if there was a fire burning in the fireplace, and to her great satisfaction, she found that there was indeed one, burning as brightly as the one she had left behind […]
Then she began to look around carefully and noticed that everything she could see from the old room was quite ordinary and uninteresting, but that everything else was vastly different. […]”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)

In The Fury of Images, Joan Fontcuberta examines the evolution of visual representation through the digital age, tracing a journey from the pictorial portraits of nobility to the proliferation of selfies and images generated by artificial intelligence. In the past, painted portraits and carte de visite offered an accurate representation of the essence and status of individuals, thus democratizing the visual image. Today, we are immersed in a visual overabundance where digital images, altered by sophisticated editing tools and algorithms, challenge our perceptions of truth and authenticity, all within the framework of intensified and aspirational capitalism.

Tableaux Vivants explores the simulation of AI-generated images through photographic portraiture, with the purpose of reflecting on the absurdity of our era and questioning the future of human representation. This project investigates the erosion of authenticity and creativity, as well as the relativity of visual truth in the digital contemporary era. At the same time, it connects with the Freudian concept of the uncanny, where the familiar becomes unsettlingly strange: AI-generated images, while mimicking reality, distort it in a way that evokes the unheimlich. From a formal perspective, the resulting images are hybrid; while the subject is photographic, the background—an enigmatic forest created through generative artificial intelligence—emphasizes the notion of the hidden, the dark, and the uncertainty inherent in this technology.