“I doubt, therefore I am” – the famous 16th century proposition by the French philosopher and scientist René Descartes resonates loudly in our current moment of images generated by artificial intelligence. Is it real, or is it fake? Can we still trust our eyes to decipher what is and what isn’t?
In this sense, Phillip Toledano’s images – constructed worlds – function as prompts within a kind of thought experiment: provocations that invite us to position ourselves within this uncertainty and to follow the cues he has so meticulously created, or written, as he puts it. They also invite us to experience a version of an infinite creative imagination that AI seem to enable us to construct.
In our conversation, the New York–based artist speaks about his versatile practice, which spans photography, sculpture, installation, and the use of new technologies, engaging questions of identity, memory, truth, and the cultural narratives that shape how we see ourselves and others.
His exhibition Edward Trevor: Never Seen The Light by Phillip Toledano opened yesterday at Fotografiska Berlin.
Nisha Merit In your art practice, “everything starts with an idea”. The medium or format follows, and the outcome is therefore very versatile. Looking at your works, social commentary, irony, and the fantastical seem to build a coherent method. What themes, issues, and questions do you explore, and how does the process work?
Phillip Toledano I don’t know how the process works, but I’m just interested in talking about what is in front of me, what interests me. And that’s such a banal answer. But a lot of my work over the last 20 years has either been deeply personal, political, or sociological – the changes I see happening in the world around us. I’ve always been interested in the structure and mechanisms of societies and how they function, and sometimes even in the structure of other societies. For example, The Absent Portrait, about the way in which women, in particular their bodies, are portrayed in the Middle East.
But I’m actually just a completely boring, normal human being. Because aren’t we all interested in our own lives and also in what’s happening in the world around us? I remember when I was sharing all the very personal stuff about my father, my sister, my daughter, and myself. Often people would say, how can you make that so public? And I always found that question really curious, because isn’t art a reflection of the self, a reflection of humanity?
NM You are right, it is something universal, but I think there’s also something very generous about your practice. One thing that struck me is the wittiness in your work, the irony. And I was wondering if you could tell me a bit more about that.
PT About my general hilariousness… Going back to humanity, one of the things that I feel is often missing from art, except for people like Jeff Koons or Maurizio Cattelan, is humour. And I feel like in the art world, humour is often looked down on. But it’s as valid as any other human emotion; it’s as important and as prevalent as the rest of them. And probably everyone at every generation says this, but I feel like in these times, if you don’t have a sense of humour, you’re doomed. I envision my AI projects like a symphony, or a movie. You can’t have just one note. You have to have differing notes to keep things interesting, to be involved, to be moved by them. You have to have pathos and sadness and horror and cruelty and humour.
NM That multitude of life. Like you said earlier, it’s basically about life reflecting itself in your work, and humour is definitely a good coping mechanism.
PT Especially living in America right now.
NM Four years ago, you started creating images with AI – how and why did you begin? Was there a specific moment when you decided to use it as an art-making tool?
PT I had been working for a long time on this project, which has never seen the light of day, called The United States of Conspiracies, because I was very interested in how America, in particular, was so interested in and so vulnerable to conspiracy theories. I noticed how in 2015, conspiracy theories used to be a fringe element of society. It was just a little aperitif, the shrimp cocktail. And now it’s like the state dinner. Before AI, I was taking images myself and then sending them to retouchers and having them created in 3D renderings. It was a very complicated, expensive, and slow process. And then AI showed up.
I was wondering, what if Donald Trump had been born poor? What would his life look like? And I made these images of Donald Trump working at a Burger King, on the subway, taking the train, as a doorman, as a homeless person. It was like a religious epiphany – I thought, shit, this is amazing! The depth of the world that you can create is limitless. It can go as far as your ideas go, which is intimidating because usually you’re constrained by technology. With AI, there is no constraint other than yourself.
And then I started thinking about the fundamental nature of photography – it was always a certificate of evidence. If you saw a photograph, it most likely had happened. And that’s gone now. Now, two things are happening: we have the perfect delivery system, which is the phone and social media. And then we have this perfect technology which anyone can use to generate images. On top of that, we are now trained to digest images in a way that favours fraud. You’re not interrogating, you’re not considering, you’re not really questioning – you just keep swiping. So we’ve only had this small moment in time of 150–170 years where photography ostensibly held truth. And that’s gone now. What I’m seeing for the first time is people saying: is this AI, or is this real? So the transition has happened. Because AI exists, everything is true and nothing is true at the same time. It’s like Schrödinger’s cat. It’s both alive and dead.
NM
I think Schrödinger’s cat is actually quite a good example. It is that dilemma – are we fine not knowing, and therefore two things can be considered true at the same time?
Do you consider your AI-generated works photography?
PT It’s not photography. I mean, this is the mistake – it just happens to look like photography. But the creative process of making work with AI is actually the entire opposite. I’ve been taking photos since I was 10. I’m ancient. So when you take pictures for 47 years, you are like a single-cell protozoan. You are a collection of habits and reflexes you’ve amassed over decades. You’re in front of a person or a situation and you understand what the light is doing. You’re not consciously thinking about those things. You’re just reacting to reflexes and triggering habits.
But for AI to make an image, you must consider every single aspect of that image. What time is it? What’s the weather? Is it snowing? Where’s the light? What’s the emotion of that person? Are they old? Are they lying down? What’s in the background? What’s in the foreground? Every single thing you have to think about, which is really exciting.
NM That is an interesting point. When it comes to creation, it feels more like painting, because of all the considerations that you go through. Do we need a new category for AI as a medium to understand it – not necessarily as a force that makes photography obsolete, but as something that introduces an intersectionality that these highly categorised ideas do not?
PT In a way, it’s actually more like writing. My father was an artist, but he was also a writer. And he used to say to me, writing isn’t writing, it’s rewriting. It’s like sharpening a skill. And that’s exactly how it is when you make an image with AI. It will take me anywhere from a couple of days to a few weeks because I’m always iterating that image until my obsessiveness is finally satisfied. You’re right, there has to be a new category because it’s not photography at all – it’s something else. We’re in an era of unprecedented visual imagination, a visual imagination exuberance.
All Photography by Edward Trevor
NM Looking at your works, the interplay between historical accounts and these detailed fictional worlds, which are quite magnificent in their visual language – when looking closely, though, there is that glitch moment, a stumble, if you will, which causes a moment of retinal re-evaluation. Please tell me about that moment.
PT I oscillate between things that seem real and things that clearly are not real. I like to invent history. And so I tip my hand all the time in those bodies of work. Robert Capa famously took pictures on D-Day in 1944. And the story is, he sent the film back to England. The lab assistant buggered up the film, and only 11 images survived. So I thought, what if I rediscovered a roll of his lost film? And the point of that work is not to tip my hand.
Because one of the criticisms people levy at AI – which is actually, ironically, the same thing that painters used to say about photography in the 1850s – is that a machine has no emotion. So for the We Are at War project, which will be shown in Berlin, the point is to say: let’s make work that, if you didn’t know it was AI, if you just walked in off the street, you’d be blown away by the power of these images.
The point of that ping-ponging between moments that seem eminently believable and things that just clearly aren’t speaks to our current relationship with the medium. Because that’s how we are now – we ping-pong between real and not real. We’re never sure. It’s to mirror our imbalance, our cognitive seasickness.
NM What does “historical surrealism” mean, a term you use in your practice? Could you contextualise that also regarding the often discussed idea of the photograph as evidence and truth?
PT History has always been kind of elastic, but I think we are living in a peak moment of historical surrealism, with a president and a government that actively rewrite history in front of us. We can see it happen. Usually it’s a thing that kind of happens over the course of decades or obscurely, and you don’t realise it until you look back at a period of history. But history is being invented as we speak. And it’s kind of fascinating to see it. So that’s what I did with Another America or Another England, where I reimagined a period of history in these particular places.
I mean, it’s a shame really, because three years ago, when I was talking about the idea that history was being invented and that photography was dead, it was not necessarily a commonly held idea. And certainly on the part of press photographers, it’s an idea they resisted. And look, they are right to resist it. But I think that idea – everyone knows now, everyone is in that liminal state.
If this notion that the photograph as evidence is dead, how do we now discuss truth? How do we know what’s true any more? For 99% of human history, the millennia that human beings have been living on this planet, there was no kind of technology that produced the truth. I guess there were engravings, paintings, then printed newspapers or announcements from your town herald. And that was their version of the truth. But what’s that language going to be? Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe everyone just wants to go to work and come home and watch the game.