Roland Meyer, DIZH Bridge Professor for Digital Cultures and Arts at UZH and ZHdK, has published two new papers.
In his essay Images from Images: Generative AI and the Reconfiguration of the ‘Photographic’, published in the journal Photography and Culture, Roland Meyer examines how AI image generators are changing our understanding of photography. Unlike photography, which captures light, generative AI analyses visual patterns in huge amounts of data and synthesises images from them. Photography thus becomes a purely stylistic quality that can be transferred from one digital image to another.
Meyer, Roland (2025): Images from Images: Generative AI and the Reconfiguration of the ‘Photographic.’ Photography and Culture 18 (3–4): 281–290. doi:10.1080/17514517.2025.2522517
In his essay Nachbarn und Verwandte. Zur Operationalisierung der Ähnlichkeit, Roland Meyer addresses the question of how similarity is technically recorded and calculated in the digital age. He explains how algorithms measure visual similarities, thereby removing artworks from their original contexts in order to organise them as comparable data points in digital collections.
Meyer, Roland (2025): Nachbarn und Verwandte. Zur Operationalisierung der Ähnlichkeit. In: Kohle, Hubertus und Schneider, Stefanie (eds.): Ähnlichkeit. Begriffe des digitalen Bildes, Vol. 7. München; Wien: Open Publishing LMU; Buchschmiede. pp. 15-32.
doi:10.5282/ubm/epub.126560