Gian Losinger
Gian Losinger is a visual artist, photographer, researcher, and lecturer. His ongoing photographic archive engages with everyday moments and things in his immediate surroundings through a caring gaze. In installations, these moments are recombined into spatial dialogue, opening an experiential field of temporal layering where photographs serve both the preservation of a lived past and the imagining of a fictional present and future. His practice is based on collecting, archiving, and critically reflecting on photographs.
He holds a BFA from HEAD, Geneva, and an MA in Art Education from HKB, Bern. He teaches media theory at the BMS Bern. His work has been shown at Galerie C, Fabienne Levy Gallery, Galerie Bernhard Bischoff & Partner, and Stadtgalerie Bern.
Doctoral Project
After Indexicality: Photography, AI, and the Search for the Human Image
Photography has widely been understood as an indexical medium whose claim for trust rests on a material connection to reality. While that claim has been contested since the medium’s invention, AI-generated imagery further destabilizes it: synthetic images circulate as documentary evidence, and authentic photographs are dismissed as artificial. This dissertation investigates where photographic trust relocates once photographs can no longer authenticate themselves. Synthetic images are generated from aggregated data stripped of their makers and contexts. Photographic archives preserve the relations between image, maker, memory, and embodied witnessing. The project asks whether photographic trust now resides in the network of relations surrounding the photographic image and if the archive can function as a methodological and conceptual countermodel to AI image production.
Situated in art history, photography theory, and media studies, the project combines theoretical analysis, qualitative interviews with artists, curators, and archivists, and a practice-based investigation of the author’s ten-year photographic archive.
Keyword
Indexicality, Photographic Trust, Visual Epistemology, Artificial Intelligence and AI-Images, Archival Practice, Embodied Witnessing
Supervisors
Prof. Dr. Elize Mazadiego, Institute of Art History, University of Bern
Prof. Dr. Priska Gisler, Institut Praktiken und Theorien der Künste, Bern Academy of the Arts