WMRAVONVWO

Installation at Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center

When we recall or imagine something, we essentially create a latent image. We work from sensory traces stored in memory, and every act of remembering is also an act of rewriting, slightly different each time. In a similar way, when we use AI and datasets to make the invisible visible, we are effectively setting human memory against algorithmic pattern analysis and image-making. WMRAVONVWO began with these observations and asks what distinguishes human perception and image-making from that of machines and how we move from human perception toward numerical abstraction.

WMRAVONVWO is a subjective and collective database. Drawing on selected literature, we build a system of different patterns and then trace our own memories back to them. We turn these into generative material experiments and document each process in a series of photographs. Each photographic experiment is also an act of pattern generation, creating structure from the randomness of the phenomenon itself, in contrast to the deterministic patterns of the machine.

Algorithmic analysis accompanies the entire process. Even before taking a photograph, we look at what the machine "thinks" about a given phenomenon. Afterward, we run the image through an image describer, which adds a second textual layer alongside our own. In this way, two interpretations are formed around the image: one human and subjective, the other machine-based and objective. We use algorithms written for different forms of machine perception to break down different forms of machine vision and pattern recognition into separate layers.

The exhibited work has two layers. The first is the photographic and video documentation of the process: the experiments, pages of the pattern database, and traces left by machine processing. The second is a live camera feed that subjects the viewer and the space, in real time, to the same image-processing operations as the recorded material. The visitor thus does not observe the process from outside but enters the cycle of observation itself.

The exhibition was on view from 1 September to 31 September 2026 at Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center

The installation created in collaboration wtih Hanna Czeglédi and Ágnes Petrucz

Curators: Emese Mucsi and Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák