Our philosophical understanding of the photograph may find its bearings in notions of time and the past, but our tools for making images are imbedded in the aggressive stride of technological innovation and forward thinking. Cameras now possess the ability to sense, capture, process, describe, augment, predict, and ‘think’, in increasingly pervasive ways. And like most computational devices, the camera is not immune to the disruptive forces of AI and machine learning.ZONE – Vienna-based Australian artist James Tunks’s third book with Perimeter Editions – seems to gesture towards this dynamic. Using flashes of searing colour as a foil for precise, meticulously detailed black and white, Tunks’s subjects and their underlying symbolism whisper to both the history and the present of the technological, explorative, concealed, and classified. Birds of prey and the Apollo Mission insignia sit alongside remote Icelandic landscapes used for lunar exploration research; blinding full-bleed images of the sun interrupt hyper-detailed telescopic photographs of the moon. Fragmented portraits reveal their own photographic processes; images echo, mirror, and double, offering shifting vantages, perspectives, and dissections.Like his first book Into Dust (2017), which saw Tunks create fake astronomical photographs using pulverised camera lenses and philosophically loaded materials, and his 2022 book AI (Art Index), which used early machine learning to recast key works from art history, ZONE plays at the peripheries of new and old knowledge. An anonymous text at the conclusion of the book’s image sequence places its protagonist in a kind of fever dream. Alone, abroad, and in possession of a secret camera prototype of unimaginable image-making power (and great value to dangerous foreign actors), he considers the implications and sheer scope of the device’s advancements.‘In past years working in the field, I had observed that technology was always a protraction of some preexisting human biological process or function; the camera for seeing, or inscribing memory, for example,’ he writes. ‘However, we had now entered an era of hyper-development in which such technology far exceeded any conceivable human capability. This was a camera that had such thermal capabilities that the flame of a candle shot from a hundred metres away could burn brighter than the sun … that was capable of photographing traces of the Apollo Mission left on the moon … that could identify the breath of an enemy insurgent in the desert at night … that could track a moving subject with five hundred times the level of range and precision with which an eagle tracks its prey.’In Tunks’s ZONE, image-making technology teeters between the ability to capture microscopic detail and the capability to cause disruption on a mass scale.
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