Major new solo exhibition from British multimedia artist Felicity Hammond opens at The Photographers’ Gallery.
Now open at The Photographers’ Gallery, (27 June - 28 Sept 2025), Variations: V3 Model Collapse is an evolving installation investigating the processes and power dynamics at play in a new era of photography. Commissioned by Photoworks and the Ampersand Foundation, across four consecutive UK venues in 2024-25, Felicity Hammond uses artificial intelligence (AI) to map how digital photographic material makes its journey from mineral to pixel; and from beneath the Earth’s surface to the screen.
During the staging of the last two variations at Brighton and Derby, photographs and data were collected from the exhibition spaces and people in them. The collected data and images are then used as training sets for the next venue. As with AI image creation, the logic from past datasets is reiterated in each new work, mimicking the constantly evolving data sets that inform machine learning platforms.
AI models are said to only be as good as the data they are trained on, so what happens when AI is trained with itself? In V3: Model Collapse at The Photographers’ Gallery, Hammond asks ‘What happens when AI-generated images that aren’t physical things in the material world are fed back into it? How does it interpret that data, and how do they start to shift and almost poison the machine?’
V3: Model Collapse offers an encounter with AI hallucinations through photographic images that have been destabilised. Using different methods from painting to collage, the photographs reflect the errors and inconsistencies of AI generated images, where the output is always an imitation. The resulting images depict distorted perspectives and ghostly figures. They begin to collapse and fall apart, full of impossibilities and inaccuracies. Variations invites us to act as both witnesses to, and participants in, the process of machine learning. In doing so, it asks us to question the long-term impact AI has on photography.
The final chapter in the four-part project V4: Repository will highlight the role of the data storage centre as a site of transmission and as an extractive and polluting process in its own right. V4 will be on show at Stills Centre for Photography in Edinburgh later this year (6 November 2025 – 7 February 2026.
Price: Price: £10 (£7 concession). Advance: £8.50 (£6 concession). Members go FREE.