Exhibition Opening: Algorithmic Photography

Alex May explains algorithmic photography as a way of representing movement and lived duration within still images. Drawing on early motion studies, stop-motion animation, experimental film and his own video installations, he asks how technology extends perception beyond ordinary bodily limits. His process records a fixed scene as video, then uses custom software to select and combine individual pixels across thousands of frames. Unlike conventional long exposures, these algorithms can retain darkness, brightness, colourfulness or combinations of properties, revealing birds’ flight paths, passing crowds, insects and other temporal patterns. GPU processing makes experimentation sufficiently responsive for him to explore different colour spaces, comparisons and accumulation methods. Action cameras support portable practice during travel, while subsequent processing functions as a digital darkroom rather than an immediate preview. May emphasises that developing these tools changes how he looks: he gradually learns to anticipate movement without eliminating surprise. Technical limitations, compression and colour representation become aesthetic resources rather than merely defects. Discussion addresses composition, processing speed, camera stability and potential object segmentation. Throughout, he contrasts physically situated experience with generated imagery and argues that artists can build independent tools, drawing on technologies from across history rather than accepting commercial platforms’ prescribed creative possibilities.

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