Session 1 · Tool Lab · Lesson 01
AI as an Interpretive System
This is not tool training, and it is not prompt optimization. AI is treated as a collaborator, not a generator — and photography as translation, not capture.
Concept
- Photography has always been mediated: optical index → chemical process → digital signal → probabilistic inference.
- Meaning shifts from seeing to inferring.
- Loss of index, gain of abstraction.
What changes when meaning shifts from seeing to inferring?
Student activity
15:00
- 01Bring one photograph you know well. Write two sentences on what you believe it shows.