Reimagining Images: From Early Photography to AI

From historical photographic practices to generative and interactive technologies, the discussion examines how authenticity, aesthetics, and perception are being reimagined.  

Participants will explore how artists and audiences learn to interpret, question, and even contribute to the creation of images, viewing vision not as passive reception but as an active, generative process. 

The discussion will be moderated by artist, filmmaker, and essayist Jonah King.

During the event, guests will also be invited to experience EXPOSURE – le regard qui brûle by Hanako Murakami. This interactive installation is activated through eye contact. A moving surface appears on screen, and the area observed by the participant begins to burn, revealing the power and intensity of the gaze. The work explores perception, presence, and the invisible relationship between viewer and image.

About the Speakers

Natasha Chuk, PhD, is a media theorist, writer, lecturer, and independent curator whose work explores the historical, philosophical, and creative dimensions of media and technology with a focus on how they shape perception, aesthetics, identity, and cultural imagination. She is the author of two books: Photo Obscura: The Photographic in Post-Photography (Intellect, 2025) and Vanishing Points: Articulations of Death, Fragmentation, and the Unexperienced Experience of Created Objects (Intellect, 2015). Her writing and criticism have also appeared in numerous periodicals and edited volumes. She currently teaches courses in film, photography, video game studies, new media art, and media theory at the School of Visual Arts and Parsons in New York City.  

Jonah King is an Irish artist, filmmaker, and essayist exploring human–nonhuman relations and speculative futures through immersive technologies. Based between Dublin and Brooklyn, their world-building creates narrative-driven installations, VR experiences, and video works that examine how ecological intimacies shape identity. King’s work has been shown at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the American Museum of the Moving Image, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, EXPO Chicago, and the New Museum, and featured in festivals including SXSW. They hold an MFA from Columbia University and a BFA from NCAD, and are Assistant Professor of Interactive Digital Media at Stevens Institute of Technology.

Hanako Murakami is an artist and researcher whose work unfolds at the intersection of image, thought, and technology. Recipient of the CNAP’s national commission Image 3.0 and supported by the ADAGP, she has presented her work in major exhibitions including Nineteenth-Century Photography Now at the Getty Museum (2024); From Here to There at Japan Society, New York (2020); La Photographie à l’épreuve de l’abstraction at FRAC Normandie (2020); and Conception at the Rencontres d’Arles (2019). She lives and works in Paris. From April – June 2026, Murakami will conduct her Arts in the Age of AI residency in New York, offered by Villa Albertine, where she will develop a project on the reinterpretation of the invention of photography through contemporary technologies such as artificial intelligence and eye-tracking. 

Villa Albertine’s residencies have been made possible, in partnership with the Albertine Foundation, through the leadership support of the Societe Generale Foundation as the major patron of the residencies, as well as the support of Fidji Simo for the Artificial Intelligence residencies.