Winning Projects of the Fotograf Zone AI Forum Open Call

The international jury composed of Boris Eldagsen, Daria Hvížďalová and Claudia Larcher, of which I was also a member, selected five artists whose projects explore the relationship between technology, image and human experience in unique and thought-provoking ways. Let us take a closer look at what each of them focused on and what makes their approach distinctive.

Verena Repar: Echoes of Grief

In this project Verena Repar connects a personal experience of loss and mourning with a technological experiment. She uses artificial intelligence to explore how a machine can help humans reflect on pain, memory and transformation. The resulting film is not only a visual work but also a process, a therapeutic dialogue between the artist and generative AI where personal experience blends with algorithmic interpretation. Each image carries traces of human memory and machine reconstruction, combining guided control and chance. The project is not only about grief but also about renewal. Through generative transformation moments of release appear as if the machine were helping to reshape memory into a new visual experience that belongs not to the past but to the present act of creation. Echoes of Grief raises the question of whether artificial intelligence can serve not only as a creative tool but also as a means of emotional healing and deeper self-understanding.

Ema Lančaričová: Images Obscure the Clouds

Images that obscure clouds form a beautiful yet slightly unsettling theme. While science has explained in great detail how clouds form, their motion and stillness in time continue to fascinate us. The artist created a visually strong series in which clouds turn into layered compositions that exist between the natural and the artificial. We are left uncertain whether we are looking at an atmospheric phenomenon captured by a camera or an image entirely produced through computation. Lančaričová raises the question of where the boundary between reality and its digital simulation lies today, and whether the image still relates to reality or already exists only within its own artificially constructed essence.

Jon Uriarte: A Neighbourhood

Artist Jon Uriarte sees the city as a living organism that can be observed and reshaped. In his project he returns to the Dalston district of London, capturing street life in all its energy and disorder. These photographs, however, serve as raw material for further exploration. Using generative technology, he creates strange and dreamlike variations of familiar places, as if the city were being seen through an accumulated and multilayered memory. The model he trained on his own photographs learns the visual language of the neighbourhood, its light and rhythm. Uriarte allows artificial intelligence to become a participant in remembering, creating together with it a new visual layer of urban experience. Instead of describing reality, a space emerges between what is real and what is remembered. The resulting image of the city is neither documentary nor fictional but a trace of the relationship between people and the places that change with time and memory.

Mai Do: VOXAIPE

In her project Mai Do translates the human voice into visual form. She created a system that analyses sound and transforms its qualities such as pitch, rhythm and tone into typography. The letters become a living organism that responds to the speaker’s voice. The project is not only a technological experiment but also a thoughtful dialogue between human and machine. The artificial intelligence used in the project independently searches for ways to understand sound and express it visually. VOXAIPE is an experiment on the boundaries of communication, exploring how what is heard can be transformed into what is seen and how human expression and algorithmic interpretation can together create a new kind of language that moves between meaning, rhythm and emotion.

Ronen Becker: Architecture As Violence

In his video work Ronen Becker lets a small room transform into a gym, a shower, a courtroom and finally an endless corridor resembling a prison. Each transition flows smoothly and hypnotically, as if architecture itself were being born from an algorithm without human intervention. The resulting environment feels cold, sterile and inhuman, echoing Michel Foucault’s theory of disciplinary spaces where architecture becomes a tool of control. Becker uses artificial intelligence not only as a technical means but also as a metaphor for systems of power. The algorithm, which operates strictly according to rules, becomes a perfect architect of control and designs spaces where there is no room for freedom or human presence.

Text: Markéta Kinterová