NFT Magazine is a proud media partner of Paris Photo 2026. Rodni Baja, Co-Founder of NFT Magazine interviewed Marco De Mutiis, who is this year's Digital Sector curator. Marco specialises in digital practices and is a Digital Curator at Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. There, he leads research into new forms of image production and circulation associated with algorithmic technologies and networked environments. He recently co-curated the exhibitions The Lure of the Image and How to Win at Photography: Image-Making as Play. He is also co-author of The Photographer’s Guide to Los Santos and co-editor of Screen Images: In-Game Photography, Screenshot, Screencast.
Paris Photo takes place from 12-15 November in the Grand Palais, Paris.
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Rodni: Following Nina Roehr's foundational work, you are leading the fourth edition of the Digital Sector. In this Bicentenary year of photography, you’ve expressed a desire to deliver a new chapter that deepens the dialogue between experimental digital practices and the longer arc of photographic history. Could you elaborate on this vision, and how this sector will navigate those historical continuities and technological ruptures?
Marco: I think that in photography there is often an assumption that there is a fixed and stable definition of the medium – mostly through technical definitions of optical systems and “fixing light”. This assumption can be seen in the attempt to establish boundaries and create convenient pre- or post-photographic spaces which sit outside of this monolithic definition of photography. My perspective is less focused on technical definitions and more interested in photography as a social development of the act of seeing and making images, which has been (and still is) in constant development, and in dialogue with different systems, technologies and ways of seeing. In this sense I am interested in understanding contemporary digital practices within this arc: pushing the transformations of the photographic and creating feedback loops between the way we have been trained to see through photography and the contemporary forms in which new imaging systems are reshaping this seeing. At the same time, I am also very aware that there are specificities connected to digital imaging which should be considered as fundamental ruptures and deserve specific understanding of photographic transformations: digital manipulation, network circulation, machine learning processes, immersive media, operational images, just to name a few.
Rodni: You mentioned a focus on work that is "experimental yet rooted in the photographic – work that pushes against the boundaries of the medium while remaining in conversation with its history. In your view, what keeps an artwork grounded in the photographic tradition even when it pushes into uncharted digital territory?
Marco: I can think of several examples of photographers and artists in the Digital Sectors who exemplify this duality. Photographers like Yumo Wu (Licheng Ling Projects) work between dark rooms, scanners, traditional camera capture, generative AI and CGI in a fluid collaborative way, which also shows dialogue within photography’s tradition and the digital present of the image. Mazaccio & Drowilal (Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting) work with photographic collages that show the logic of internet circulation, reappropriating both the overwhelming density of online images as well as the aesthetic of sunsets and puppies and celebrity picture which have been shaping the internet. Other photographers like Summer Wagner (Nguyen Wahed Gallery) work with traditional photographic techniques, but depict scenes where digital images are omnipresent – shaping identities and socialities through doom scrolling and screen obsessed characters. Of course there are also artists who are really working with digital technologies like generative AI – like Charlie Engman or Alkan Avcıoğlu (Heft) – who are clearly referencing a photographic language, while working with the specific aesthetics and processes allowed by machine learning processes.
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Rodni: You defined contemporary images as "sites of collaboration and conflict between humans and non-humans." When selecting positions for this year’s sector, how did you ensure the exhibition highlights the critical friction between artistic intent and algorithmic control, rather than just showcasing seamless technology?
Marco: I think most of the artists I follow have an interesting mix between the two poles, and that ambiguity is very productive for me. I am thinking of works like Caleb Stein and Andrea Orejarena’s (Palo Gallery) American Glitch, where they explore the slippage between belief and fiction through online images related to conspiracy theory and the internet seen as collective subconscious. In his series New Alphabets, Alejandro Cartagena’s (Carmen Araujo Art) starting point is the fact that existing images will be read by machine and become part of training datasets, and therefore tries to render them illegible and compose new visual vocabularies. In both examples, artists work critically but still operate within these systems of digital visualities.
Rodni: You've written that photography has shaped how we interpret the world for two centuries. In an era where AI and synthetic images have exploded, what is the biggest cultural challenge to that interpretation? Do you see a need for more safeguards and regulations, or are you more focused on the creative positives this technology brings?
Marco: This question is of course very relevant and timely, but it also contains so many implications for many different fields of photography that is difficult to answer. Clearly, the role of misinformation in photojournalism has reached centre stage – although we are reminded of similar discussions from the 90s and the “crisis of truth” in Photoshop times. AI Slop has become the ultimate operational image for social media – the most fast and efficient image to produce and circulate in networked economies of attention and reaction. And we haven't even started discussing the implications of copyright, the impact on the environment, the effects on job markets that are associated with the development of these systems by corporations. At the same time, we are also seeing artists, scholars and scientists working on alternative models, poisoning datasets, using tactical media to reclaim these systems. I am interested in the development of all of these practices, and while I recognise the value of safeguards and regulations coming from above, I am somehow pessimistic that these will have an effect – but I am hopeful that these systems can be reclaimed, reshaped, disassembled and reused in ways that can be critical and still creative. A man can dream, no? 😉
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Rodni: Mainstream discourse loves a good crisis, frequently declaring photography "murdered" by Photoshop, smartphones, and now generative AI. You’ve argued instead that the medium is permanently "undead." Why do you think we remain so deeply stuck in this cycle of panic, and how can institutions reframe these technical shifts as evolutions rather than obituaries?
Marco: A lot of these cycles of panic are also cycles of hype, and I think they are two sides of the same coin. These logics are attached to different interests and fears, cultural or economic, from different actors. I also think it’s important to see how evolutions, transformations and changes are in contrast with the way many of these disciplinary walls get erected – in museums but also in funding bodies who, in order to support a project within a specific discipline, need to define its boundaries more precisely. Furthermore, I think there is also something about the particular history of photography – which has fought to be accepted as an art form in the 20th century – which makes the whole idea of opening up the medium a risk of “compromising the canon” and somehow losing that art status. At the same time, I think we are also seeing a lot of institutions being more open than when I started my job as Digital Curator at Fotomuseum Winterthur in 2015. The changes in image-making in the last 30 years have become difficult to ignore, and many institutions are tackling expanded forms of photography, which I believe is necessary when it comes to contemporary photography and image practices of the present.
Rodni: You mentioned that after three decades of digital imaging, "we no longer 'see' through optics alone," but through Photoshop layers, algorithms, and social media aesthetics. Has this post-optical condition shape your spatial layout across the sector?
Marco: Every booth is conceived to maximise TikTok exposure and I have rotated them to achieve vertical format for optimal smartphone consumption. 😜
Rodni: You mentioned the economy of 'likes' when it comes to perceiving work. Corporate platforms offer vital visibility, but force artists to compromise their work, cropping to rigid aspect ratios and tailoring stories to feed the algorithm. Globally, how are these platforms rewriting human perception, and how can an artist find true autonomy when forced to play by corporate rules?
Marco: In 2021 I curated an exhibition called How to Win at Photography – Image-Making as Play with Matteo Bittanti. We were interested in the tensions between video games and photographic images, but also in the gamification of photography through platforms that turn attention into point systems of ‘likes’ and ‘followers’. I’m bringing up this project, because if we understand image production, circulation and consumption as a form of play, then we can also imagine different ways to play the game. One can play following the rules and expectations of social media platforms, but one can also play subversively, going against the rules, creating different games within these structures. One of the examples we quoted in the show was the Instagram Egg, which was this picture of an egg created and uploaded solely for the purpose of beating the record of Instagram likes. So, on one hand we have witnessed the emergence of “influencer photography” aesthetics in the 2010s, but on the other hand we have seen a lot of artists and social media users messing with these value systems, with forms of small rebellions and reappropriation of corporate structures.
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Rodni: With social media algorithms constantly siloing visual trends into isolated bubbles, are there specific photographic movements or digital subcultures active right now that you worry institutional curators might be entirely missing?
Marco: I do think there are some recent histories of digital photography that are largely absent in institutional curatorial research. For example the whole emergence and spread of “cursed images” is in my opinion a very interesting moment and aesthetic which bridges appropriated Flickr digital camera (pre-iPhone) photography and network circulation and appropriation – but something that somehow still comes out in many generative AI “weirdness” of the GAN era and early diffusion models. A lot of photographic subcultures that live on social media actually work with the specificities of the platform and the feed, so they do not enter institutional spaces because they don’t need to and they would not work in the physical conventions of white cube galleries. I’m thinking of the “same picture every day” practices that post exactly the same image on social media accounts repeatedly, or the more recent “shrimp jesus” slop images that flooded Facebook and work in an operational form that requires the networked space.
Rodni: Mimi Ọnụọha’s conceptual artwork, The Library of Missing Datasets, powerfully highlights the empty spaces in our information systems, the blank files that society or corporations choose not to track or collect. When we apply this to generative AI models, which are completely blind to human nuance, marginalised histories, and niche subcultures, what do you believe the long-term cultural ramifications of this erasure will be? How should cultural institutions, curators, and society at large address these massive algorithmic gaps?
Marco: Many recent artworks have rightly pointed to the limits of machine learning, and the discriminatory bias of AI systems. I think the term “machine realism” by Trevor Paglen, or “parametric truth” by Simon C Niquille are useful in showing the dangerous applications of these flawed technological mindsets to larger social and political realms. I think the major fear is that machine realism might be integrated in the infrastructures that govern policies. I don’t have an answer to this, but I think that cultural institutions can and should be spaces for these discussions and facilitate critical discourse. At the end of the day, we should remember that these systems are ours to use, misuse, or not use.
Rodni: You stated that the sector looks at "the emerging forms that will shape how we see for the next two centuries." When visitors leave the Grand Palais after experiencing the Digital Sector, what central understanding of photography's future do you hope they take with them?
Marco: I hope visitors will be inspired by the processes and approaches of artists, and see how they use technology and play with it to create new ways of seeing and new possibilities for image-making. More than the visual surface of the images, I am even more inspired by the idea of playing with the medium, of using computational systems in the “wrong” way, in refusing to meet the expectations of corporate platforms. This is for me not something that exists within the art context, but should be applied to different realms of our private life.
