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Essays and Reflections

On image, algorithm, and the responsibility of the author in contemporary visual culture.

The texts on this page accompany artistic practice and visual research, placing them in a broader dialogue with image theory, technological ethics, and contemporary visual culture. They are not reviews and they are not tutorials — they are stated positions toward questions that have no simple answers.

This page brings together reflections on artistic practice in the context of digital and post-photographic art. The blog functions as a space of critical investigation, where visual projects are accompanied by the ideas, questions, and positionings that generate them.

The texts explore the relationship between image and technology, between access and meaning, between artistic intention and the aesthetic risk of the decorative in the generative era. Here, the creative process is contextualised conceptually, and the works are placed in a broader dialogue about the role of the artist and the status of the image in a culture of simulation.

ESEEY · April 05, 2026

Public Intervention

his text represents a critical public intervention on the transformations brought about by artificial intelligence in contemporary art. Drawing on the context of artist Ovidiu Belceanu's exhibition Simulacru, the article examines the shift from the created image to the generated image, the redefinition of the artist's role, and the cultural implications of algorithms. In dialogue with Joana Zylinska's theoretical perspective, the text argues that artificial intelligence systems are not neutral — they reproduce and amplify existing cultural structures, thereby raising the question of the artist's responsibility in the use of these technologies.

ESSAY · March 26, 2026

Delegated Imagination – Published in Helion Magazine, No. 1–2/2026

The essay explores the transformation of human imagination in a context where the production of visual imagery is partially delegated to technological systems. From a critical perspective, the text does not focus on how algorithms function, but on the redefinition of imagination as a process distributed between humans and digital infrastructures. Within this framework, the central stake becomes understanding what it means to imagine together with technology, as well as the limits and responsibilities that arise from this co-participation. Published in Helion Magazine, the essay continues the lines of inquiry developed in the volume From the Real to the Augmented.

ESSAY · February 20, 2026

The Ethics of AI-Generated Imagery – Published in Cultura Magazine, “Fields of Expertise” section, March 24, 2026

The essay addresses three inseparable dimensions of contemporary artistic practice: the transparency of the creative process, the crisis of authorship in the algorithmic age, and the cultural responsibility toward the invisible bias embedded in generative systems.

Drawing on concrete case studies and a theoretical framework that integrates contributions from Zylinska, Crawford, Manovich, and Galanter, the text proposes ethics not as an external norm imposed on creation, but as its underlying infrastructure—something that precedes and conditions aesthetic decision-making.

The central argument: in a world where an image can be anything, the process is what makes it authentic.

ESSEY · February 20, 2026

The Image in the Age of AI: Document or Construction?

Photography long functioned as a visual oath — the guarantee that something existed. In the era of generated images, this certainty has fractured irreversibly. The essay traces the shift from image-as-document to image-as-construction, and poses a new question: not "is this image real?" but "what position does it uphold, and who owns it?"

ESSEY · January 20, 2026

The Danger of Decorative Photography and Ornamental Generative Art

It has never been easier to produce spectacular images — and that is precisely the problem. Generative art risks becoming an engine of digital decoration: beautiful, hypnotic, but conceptually hollow. The essay argues that the artist's role in the age of AI is to resist the programme, not execute it.

ESSEY · December 18, 2025

Modern and Contemporary Painting: Artistic Expression versus Photographic Documentation

Photography carries a stronger documentary character than painting — not to diminish painting, but to clarify the distinct functions each medium fulfils. A text developed as an intervention at the opening of the exhibition "The White That Speaks," Banatul Montan Photo Club, Reșița.