Photographic Cues
By Keziah MacNeill
Image credit: Keziah MacNeill
In a world increasingly mediated by algorithms, artist Keziah MacNeill asks a provocative question: what happens when the tools we use to see the world become indistinguishable from the world itself? Through 'Photographic Cues,' she explores a speculative future where the boundaries between natural lenses (like bodies of water), mechanical cameras and AI systems dissolve into one another.
Concept and vision
MacNeill's work points to the year 2072 – 50 years after the project's creation – imagining a time when the distinction between image-making tools and the images themselves has completely broken down. The project emerged from a fascinating parallel: both a Scottish loch and a camera serve as lenses on the world, one natural and one mechanical. But in an age of AI, where both images and the tools that create them are ultimately reduced to the same digital code, what happens to our understanding of reality?
Technical journey
MacNeill's approach to The New Real Observatory platform was uniquely exploratory. She uploaded two distinct sets of images: pinhole camera photographs of a loch and digital photographs of the pinhole camera itself. By feeding both the tool and its output into the AI system, she created a deliberate collapse of categories – the observer and the observed, the medium and the message.
This technical approach reflected her broader conceptual investigation. Just as the platform allowed her to blur the boundaries between different types of images, she was exploring how AI systems might eventually create a self-referential world where synthetic content and the algorithms that create it become indistinguishable.
Image credit: Keziah MacNeill
The work
The resulting work is presented both as a physical installation and a digital interface. In its physical form the images are presented on a digital screen, with new ones emerging when the viewer disturbs the water in the scaled model of the loch in front of them. Thus, MacNeill's generated images exist in a liminal space between photograph and algorithm, natural and artificial. The work suggests a future where a body of water, such as that of a Scottish loch, might serve as the last truly analogue lens in a world where digital tools have merged with their outputs.
Significance
'Photographic Cues' offers a crucial insight about our algorithmic future. The speculative collapse of categories raises profound questions about how we'll understand reality in a world where the boundaries between natural, mechanical and digital ways of seeing have dissolved.
The work serves as both warning and meditation on the future of perception itself. When the distinction between tool and topic, media and medium, breaks down completely, what happens to meaning? MacNeill's exploration suggests that we might need to preserve some forms of analogue seeing – like the natural lens of a loch – to maintain our connection to the physical world.
Footnotes
The New Real Observatory is part of The New Real, a partnership between University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh’s Festivals and The Alan Turing Institute. Featured artists Adam Harvey, Inés Cámara Leret, Keziah MacNeill, Lex Fefegha.
Supported by UK Research and Innovation (EPSRC, AHRC), Towards Turing 2.0, Creative Scotland, Scottish AI Alliance, and the Data-Driven Innovation Programme.
‘Photographic Cues’ was commissioned as a project of The New Real Observatory, first presented simultaneously as a hybrid experience and as a digital experience live at ARS Electronica 2022 in Linz, Austria.
Links
Artist bio
Keziah McNeill is a Scottish artist and recent graduate from Edinburgh College of Art. Hosted by a photographic practice, her thoughts place themselves in a digital age where the remix, a regeneration of information, becomes default and acts of customisation become rewarding. McNeill creates circuits of personalisation within the photographic process, employing structural and sonic adjustments to fabricate new darkroom personas. She travels through the infinite rhythm of regeneration; occasionally slowed down by the potholes of indecision, and habitual detachment.
Cite as: Keziah MacNeill (2025). ‘Photographic Cues.’ The New Real Magazine, Edition Two. pp. 27-29. www.newreal.cc/magazine-edition-two/photographic-cues
