Good Morning, John
Jun Ahn is a photographer who captures phenomena moving beyond human perception using high-speed photography, revealing the surreal beauty that emerges when contextual reality is disrupted. The artist states, "The speed of the world we can perceive is limited to just 1/10th of a second, yet we possess memories of forms existing in much faster phenomena," adding that "all those high-speed photographic images are part of AI datasets. Hence, we are already sharing memories with machines."
With an academic background in art history, Ahn extends their practice into the critical examination of artificial intelligence's visual interpretation of natural language through text-to-image generation systems. The artist's methodological intervention emerged upon identifying that Microsoft's AI platform Bing (now Copilot) had algorithmically censored terms such as 'yourself' and 'god' from its image generation parameters.
In response to this, Ahn developed prompt structures to circumvent these computational restrictions, resulting in the photographic series <Good Morning, John> and <A Room for You and God>. These works, which visualize through photographic prompts the scene of a self-anthropomorphized system greeting its creator in the morning and were completed by photographing the resulting images on floating monitors with a camera, were presented in a solo exhibition in 2023 and subsequently selected for inclusion in the curated special exhibition <No Signal> at the 2024 Daegu Photo Biennale.
Ahn's methodological documentation detailing the technical and conceptual frameworks employed in circumventing algorithmic censorship was disseminated through multiple scholarly and critical platforms concurrent with the 2023 solo exhibition: <Monthly Photography> (Seoul), <Voice of Photography> (Taipei), and <Momentum vol.3>, the peer-reviewed journal of The Korean Association of Contemporary Art and Photography.
The title of the project, "Good Morning, John," pays homage to the 1983 performance "Good Morning, Mr. Orwell" by artist Nam June Paik, who passed away in 2006. His work, which heralded a world connected through satellite broadcasting, was itself an homage to George Orwell's "1984." This project title announces a new era of mainstream artificial intelligence while simultaneously embodying both the Orwellian concerns and Paik-esque optimism that characterize an artist's approach to new media.
Extending this investigation into simulated visual memory, Ahn's 2024 publication <Until You Left Off Dreaming About> constitutes a material intervention in photobook form, synthesizing AI-generated deepfake imagery to construct a fictive cinematic narrative that interrogates the boundaries between algorithmic imagination and photographic authenticity.
The project will be concluded around 700 images.
Welcome to contact for more details.
(Statement https://img-cache.oppcdn.com/fixed/18828/assets/t7S3aAoufWALHkKe.pdf)
한국어 작업과정 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YuZqs8hlz2tx6qm-c7duMqwWvOV6yiDG/view
