What Is This Image Doing Here? Artificiality, Authorship and Error as Method

This investigation begins with a domestic photograph — a stuffed orangutan sitting on a child’s potty, with its pants down — and with the generative expansion process carried out with Adobe Photoshop 2024 and 2026 (Firefly Image 1), without the use of textual commands. Throughout the successive expansions, aged human figures, bodily fragmentations, and shadows of ambiguous morphology that no one had requested began to emerge. The recurrence of these elements became the focus of the research: why do elderly bodies appear in an image constructed around childhood? What does the system recognize that was not asked for?

The research unfolds through a turn-taking process between the artist and the algorithmic system, in which the decisions to keep, reject, or re-insist on an image constitute the method. Error is not treated as a technical failure, but as a condition of observation — the moment when the assumptions and mechanisms of artificial vision systems become visible. Drawing on references from Flusser, Parisi, Sekula, Crawford, Benjamin, and Campagna, the exposition proposes error as an epistemological method in contemporary artistic research.