Every artistic medium starts from the unfolding of reality as a means of understanding it. This process is marked by the specific techniques that each of the arts uses to represent reality symbolically.

Requiring immediate reality, photography found itself facing the abyss of a new creative concept: giving meaning to visible reality, to that very reality that the camera reproduced with unprecedented precision, a departure from the principle of creating on a blank page or canvas.

In our contemporary society, the silver photographic process, digital photography and images with a photographic finish generated by artificial intelligence are all used by artists for the conception of their work to the same end: to transcend the visible in order to express the vicissitudes of human beings and question the social reality that surrounds them.

This conference addresses the position adopted by art, science and thought in their mediation with reality in the face of the new challenges presented by the 21st century.

Session 1 (22 October)
From intimate to social reality
Sandy Moldavia, Israel Ariño, Juanan Requena and Juana Dolores

Today I am thinking of a self-portrait to distance the self from dissolution 
Starting from extimacy, Sandy Moldavia uses her works to explore the desire of a self that seeks the common ground through self-representation in order to expose the contradictions inherent in capitalist society."

The subversion of reality 
Israel Ariño demonstrates how to transcend the descriptive sphere to show the hidden: to subvert appearance. Both the geographical space—territory and inhabitants—and the mental space of intimate experience become the poetic dimension of photography.

“Collection of whens”
Juanan Requena states: "Photographs speak of the duration of what was believed for a moment, or of its fragile stay (...) "Of the fluctuations that memory always transforms. (...) Of what grows invisible scarcely and drapes memory with hundreds of robes of mist.

Erotic notes on the dialectic between the political and the personal in femininity
Juana Dolores analyses the lines of her work to reflect on femininity from the sociocultural and intimate sphere, exploring capacities for disruption and the prefigurative forms of dissidence, transgression and subversion against normativity and capitalist morality.

* Talks in Catalan and Spanish.

Session II (23 October)
From physical to illusory reality
Michael Wesely

The Order of the Camera
Michael Wesely will talk about his formal conception when he explores reality through the behaviour of the camera. Channelling its technical foundation allows him to explore the limits of exposure time, different aperture conditions and a new idea of focus, with which he manages to transcend the representation of the photographic moment to create images that reinterpret the visual representation of time.

* Talk in English

Session III (24 October)
From visible to generated reality
Tanit Plana, Josep Maria Ganyet

The queer machine 
Tanit Plana takes artificial intelligence by the hand and leads it to the margins; she diverts it in order to attack the mechanisms that constitute it, those that perpetuate outdated social, economic, and geopolitical models. Embracing contradictions in creation and synthetic methods is a poetic and political gesture. There is no what the machine can do or what the machine does; it is not it or us. I am the machine. You are the machine.

Generative AI: from Socrates to Frankenstein 
Josep Maria Ganyet establishes an analogy between Socrates's opposition to the technology of the written word and the creative community’s opposition to artificial intelligence (AI). Will AI generation make us forget how to create? Another analogy can be found in the processes of creation with generative AI, in which person and machine create from pre-existing pieces, as in the case of Dr Frankenstein and his monster. Could the monster end up killing us? Or can it deliver us from repetitive tasks?

 * Talks in Catalan.

Sandy Moldavia (Barcelona, 1994). Sandy Moldavia has a degree in Arts and Design specialised in Visual Storytelling from the Escola Massana and a master's degree in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the University of Barcelona. She is a visual artist who uses photomontage, writing and embroidery to explore the poetics of failure arising from capitalism through a critical reading of the social context in which she is immersed.

Israel Ariño (Barcelona, 1974). Israel Ariño has a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona and a diploma in Photography from the Catalan Institute of Photographic Studies. His projects are based on the act of seeing in the desire for images to express the invisible, that which is hidden behind things, that which suggests and makes us dream; a photography in which language is a means to question, transcend and reinvent reality.

Juanan Requena (Nauchipán, 1983). Over time, Juanan Requena nurtured nomadic ideas to capture them in notebooks in the form of words and photographs; and even today—as never before—the impulse keeps returning to the warmth of that first light... The faint light that always accompanies memories.

Juana Dolores (El Prat de Llobregat, 1992). Juana Dolores studied acting at the Higher School of Dramatic Art of the Theatre Institute. She writes and directs her own plays and is a poet and video artist. Her work stems from the dialectic between politics and aesthetics. She works in several lines of research: revolution, propaganda, beauty-fiction, socialist realism, femininity, sexuality, desire and eroticism/pornography.

Michael Wesely (Munich, 1963). Michael Wesely studied at the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Photographie and at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich. He understands photography from the perspective of the interiority of the camera, a three-dimensional space that captures light and frames a still image that subverts the visual and conceptual representation of time.

Tanit Plana (Barcelona, 1975). Tanit Plana has a degree in Audiovisual Communication from Pompeu Fabra University. She holds a master's degree in Secondary Education and received a Leonardo grant from the BBVA Foundation, a Vegap Proposals grant and an Art for Change grant from "la Caixa" Foundation. The mediation processes involving the body, politics and images have been a constant feature of her work. 

Josep Maria Ganyet (Vic, 1965). Josep Maria Ganyet has a degree in Computer Engineering from the UAB and is specialized in artificial intelligence. He has worked in the field of human-computer interaction, design, teaching and communication in IBM, Deutsche Bank and Gotomedia. He has created companies in the fields of design, communication and archaeology.

Curated by: Ramón Casanova and Llorenç Raich. Department of Cultural Activities of the Catalan Institute of Photographic Studies
Directed by: Josep Maria de Llobet
Organized by: Catalan Institute of Photographic Studies (IEFC)
With the collaboration of La Virreina Centre de la Imatge
With the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Generalitat of Catalonia

https://www.iefc.cat/
http://jornades.iefc.cat/(under construction)