Metanoia

Metanoia approaches photography as a medium in constant transformation—an image whose identity shifts among material object, technological process, data, and spatial experience. The title derives from the Greek metanoia, meaning a change of mind or a fundamental transformation in one’s way of thinking. Here, this transformation applies to photography itself: a medium whose definitions are repeatedly destabilized with technological changes.

Rather than asking where photography is heading, Metanoia begins with a more fundamental question: what is photography now? The project examines the medium's boundaries at a moment when the photograph can simultaneously exist as a physical object, chemical trace, computational image, dataset, screen-based representation, or information stored within an invisible technological infrastructure. These forms do not simply replace one another. They coexist, overlap, and continually redefine precisely what a photographic image can be.

The project consists of several connected works—Why Look at Cameras, There Is Something Wrong with These Clouds, Depth of Photography, and Metaphotography—each approaching this transformation from a different perspective. Cameras become both image-producing apparatuses and objects to be photographed; artificial intelligence generates images that are subsequently returned to physical photographic materials; the seemingly immaterial cloud is confronted with the massive material infrastructure of data centers; and the traditionally flat photographic surface acquires depth, movement, and spatial presence. The image repeatedly crosses the threshold between the material and the immaterial, the analog and the computational, the visible and the invisible.

Analog and instant photographic processes play a particular role within these experiments. They are not used nostalgically or as an opposition to digital technologies, but as physical interfaces through which contemporary transformations of photography can be examined. By transferring computational images back into chemical and material forms, or connecting analog surfaces with augmented reality and other digital layers, Metanoia deliberately disrupts the assumed distinction between old and new photographic technologies.

This approach draws on Vilém Flusser’s concept of the apparatus and his figure of the experimental photographer, who does not simply operate within the possibilities prescribed by photographic apparatus but attempts to expose, question, and play against its program. In Metanoia, however, the photographic apparatus extends far beyond the camera. It includes algorithms, artificial intelligence, screens, networks, data storage, software, industrial infrastructures, and the systems that produce, circulate, perceive, and preserve images.

As photography becomes increasingly computational, its apparent dematerialization paradoxically reveals new forms of materiality. The cloud has architecture. Data requires physical storage, energy, and space. Generated images remain dependent on infrastructures and existing visual archives. Even an image without a conventional photographic referent is embedded within material and technological conditions that determine how it can exist and become visible.

Metanoia therefore understands photography not as a stable category defined by a particular apparatus or technique, but as an operative system of relations between image, material, technology, infrastructure, and perception. Its identity resides precisely in its capacity to migrate between these states. Rather than searching for a definitive boundary between photography and non-photography, the project inhabits that boundary as a creative space—asking not where photography ends, but how its continuous transformations compel us to reconsider what photography can be.