The Photographers’ Gallery and Goethe-Institut London invite proposals for two micro-commissions from artists or collectives based in the UK or Germany.
This free open call marks the beginning of a new collaboration between The Photographers’ Gallery and Goethe-Institut London. Together, we seek to explore the cultural, societal, emotional, and aesthetic implications of creating art for — and with — machines. The resulting research and artworks will be presented on Unthinking Photography, our platform exploring photography’s automated, networked life.
Through this open call and future discussions, workshops and opportunities, we hope to make visible and interrogate where this next generation of photography is situated, what form it takes and how its symbolism, data and networks reconfigure the visible worlds being built around us.
The opportunity is open to artists and collectives engaged in photography and visual practices. Each selected proposal will receive a fee of €1,500.
We are particularly interested in proposals that consider:
How cultural practices shift within computational environments
How feedback loops shape artistic production
The implications of making work for machine viewers
Proposals may address (but are not limited to) themes such as:
Human-in-the-loop
Ghost in the machine
Machinic audiences: artworks created for systems or non-human agents (e.g. social media bots, automation, digital twins, AI companions)
Emotion detection and affective computing
Anthropomorphic intelligence
Synthetic cultures
Training, reinforcement, or continuous learning systems
Intersections between creativity and AI-driven infrastructures
computation pipelines between creativity and other uses of AI
Prompt engines
Geographical restrictions of knowledge and censored response
Emerging aesthetics shaped by AI
AI psychosis and machine hallucination
Collective intelligence and distributed cognition
Computation and data colonialism
Eligibility: Artists or collectives based in the UK or Germany.
What do you get: 1500EUR and work exhibited on unthinking photography.
deadline: 20 November 2025
more info: https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/whats-on/open-call-ghost-loop
