Image, Data, Reality: A Photographer’s Critical Engagement with AI
Image, Data, Reality: A Photographer’s Critical Engagement with AI
In this webinar, photographer Jialin Long traces her evolving relationship with AI image-making, from early experimentation to a sustained critical practice questioning how photography shapes our perception of reality, as explored in her work The 3 Roses (2025). The work asks what remains of a subject when image-making constructs, layers, and ultimately erases her. The talk will also present recent experimental work in which photographic images are translated into data, binary code, pixel colour, and a dialogue with the bot, exploring what this process reveals about the nature of image-making today.
Jialin Long is a Chinese lens-based visual artist based outside Dublin. Her practice engages with photography and moving images to explore identity, feminism, and cultural clashes that resonate with contemporary society. Solo exhibitions and screenings include Red Illuminates II: Age Instructions on Marriage and Childbearing, The Library Project; Red Illuminates, The Courthouse Gallery, Co. Clare; Selected group exhibitions include ARCHIPELAGO, RHA Gallery, Dublin; Club to Club Festival, OGR venue, Turin, Italy; Mason Hayes & Curran photography exhibition, Dublin; MAKING ART: Photography, Drafocht Gallery, Dublin; The Figurative Seven, The Courthouse Gallery, Co. Clare; In Our Own Image: Photography and the Social Gaze, Photo Museum Ireland.
Recent awards include the TBG+S Recent Graduate Residency Award, TBG+S Project Studio Award, the Create AIC, Recent Graduate Research and Development Award, and Arts Council of Ireland Agility and Bursary Awards. Commissions include TBG+S Flag Commission, the Visual Art Commission at The Dock Gallery, Carrick-on-Shannon, The Figurative Seven Commission for The Courthouse Gallery, Co.Clare and Creative Ireland/ Dublin City Council’s Diversity Commission. Her work is held in the national Photo Museum Ireland Collection and the Arts Council of Ireland Collection.
Poster Image: detail of”Green Rose Real”, Jailin Long, Image courtesy of the artist
This event is supported by Clare, Limerick and Tipperary County Councils