Master Photography

PHOTOGRAPHY

Automated Photography at Foto/Industria

with Milo Keller, Marco De Mutiis

The MAST Foundation is presenting the seventh edition of Foto/Industria, the world's first biennial event devoted to photography of industry and work, at a number of historic venues in Bologna and at MAST. The 12 exhibitions in Foto/Industria 2023 represent a chronology of points of view on the theme of PLAY, from the end of the 19th century to the present day. They offer an opportunity to observe and delve into the research of a selection of international artists. The ECAL is presenting an exhibition of its research project Automated Photography. An increasing number of images are produced autonomously by machines for machines with a gradual exclusion of any human intervention. Automated Photography is a research project developed by the Master Photography that addresses this situation by examining the technologies of image production and distribution such as: machine learning, CGI, photogrammetry.

Augmented Photography

with Milo Keller Maxime Guyon, Joël Vacheron

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Tanguy Morvan – We All Walk On Empty Staircases

by Tanguy Morvan

We All Walk On Empty Staircases reflects the deep scars of the artist's childhood traumas. Growing up in a violent and tormented environment left permanent marks on his mind. At the age of seven, he found refuge in the game World of Warcraft, where he immersed himself for sixteen years, creating an idealized version of himself. In recent years, his grandfather introduced him to the Masonic world, which deepened his fascination with rituals. For the past six months, he has been transforming his body through tattooing, a process that has allowed him to regain control over both his mind and body while staying connected to past memories. His project invites reflection on the impact of domestic violence and the healing power of rituals.

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Benjamin Freedman – Positive Illusions

by Benjamin Freedman

Positive Illusions is a photobook that depicts a series of childhood memories constructed using CGI. The resulting uncanny still lives, imagined from the perspective of a child, evoke a strange family presence in photo-realistic environments. Inspired by the nature of memory and simulation, I have based my scenes on what I could remember and used a phenomenological approach to fill in the blanks. Revisiting the past using CGI technology to re-stage events creates a unique flattening of the past and present – a process of pseudo visual archaeology. Some images in the series are repeated but with slight alterations, revealing the surrealist process of fabricating them and underscoring the phenomenon of distortion that is inherent to memory.

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Amandine Kuhlmann – Cash Me Online

by Amandine Kuhlmann

Cash Me Online is a video project where I stage myself, combining performance with found footage. With the goal of achieving viral fame, I embrace delusion and despair in this exploration, which delves into the impact of cameras in the era of social media. Through a hyper-feminine digital alter ego based on my own algorithm, I perform in virtual and physical realms, fulfilling desires and aspirations. The project questions self-representation and the female gaze in the presence of empowered women on screen. The project examines tensions between toxic feminine tropes and how women reclaim them for empowerment. Found footage combined with a deepfake of my own face serves as a visual album, revealing content diversity and standardisation, introducing ambiguity in notions of dysmorphia.

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Yumo Wu – The Room and the Photographs

by Yumo Wu

The Room and the Photographs investigates the intertwined relationship between perception, space and photography. Initially, observers were placed inside a room to witness the raw essence of photography in the camera obscura. The digital evolution has reshaped the ontology of the medium and provided an entirely metamorphosed experience – observing photography with a detachment from reality. As in painting, I assemble a meticulous collection of physical photographs and computer-generated imagery. These domestic spaces lose their inherent perspective. They are familiar yet strange, fractured yet imbalanced. My photographic constructions, part memories, part materiality, attempt to reveal the complexity of perception in the realm of photography.

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Olivia Wünsche – New State of Equilibrium

by Olivia Wünsche

New State of Equilibrium is a visual interpretation of my years-long spiritual quest and psychedelic adventures. Inner peace, a sense of deep connectedness, unbounded love for the natural world and longing for transcendence are central themes I tried to visualise throughout this project. Both the book and the installation attempt to question and investigate the mechanisms and limitations of our cognitive and sensory perception. By emphasising the simultaneous presence of the visible and the invisible, I seek to challenge the secular, materialistic worldview that still seems to prevail in our Western culture.

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Robin Bervini – Until I Stop Trying to Get Out of My Skin

by Robin Bervini

Mention Excellent Prix Elinchrom “Until I Stop Trying to Get Out of My Skin” is a spatial and virtual reality installation that depicts the artist’s personal struggle in seeking his identity as a mixed-race man in Southern Switzerland. Surrounded by white family and friends and knowing only local culture, the artist identified as white, but the continuous questioning of his origins and prejudices made him doubt his belonging. The installation puts the viewer in the artist’s shoes: by embodying his avatars, the viewer meets the artist’s alter-egos which are the embodiment of his ideal selves at various stages of his life.

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Alina Frieske – Abglanz

by Alina Frieske

Abglanz is a German word used to describe a ‘pale reflection’ or a ‘distant echo’. The project investigates the value and accessibility of personal visual information online. Fragments of images taken from social media platforms are reconstructed into a new scenario. Thereby, the original meaning of the images is put into another context. The work becomes an allegory of display, questioning how we are reflected and recognized behind the screen. It is presented in a panoramic view in order to guide the attention through the collection at large.

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Moritz Jekat – Wetlands of Pharmacology

by Moritz Jekat

Exterior virtual organs that enter our bodies and transform our brains surround us. These pharmaca multiply in wetlands between online and real life. In a desire for healing and reconnecting, a group of humanoid aliens inhabit this space and come together in a caring pile of thoughts, emotions and dreams. They share with you, thanks to subconscious writing and wetland tools. A waterbed in space invites you to relax. In the concept of adoption of pharmacology, in contrast to adaptation to the super-fast, consumption-based virtual spheres that are transforming social habits, Wetlands of Pharmacology experiments with a slow coming together and exchange of emotional and physical knowledge of five artists in a computer game engine.

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Alessia Gunawan – Counter Faith

with Simone Niquille, François Zajega

“Counter Faith” addresses a personal narrative with the aim of understanding the driver behind the construction of gated communities in Indonesia, while the violent events of 1998 remain unresolved in the nation’s damaged belief system. Single-channel video, 10'34"

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Igor Pjörrt – Apartamento

with Bruno Ceschel

Growing up between apartments in the same complex, a familiar feeling would remain in the empty homes, encouraging transformation. Such is the experience of inhabiting a body, fluctuating from one state into another. In “Apartamento”, this oscillation takes place in potential constellations around gender binarity. The male/female dichotomy is replaced by a dichotomy between gender and its negation. This renunciation however, is a perpetual shift, a gathering of questions rather than answers, a set of daily contemplations in the face of psychic constructs.

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Justinas Vilutis – Body without Organs

by Justinas Vilutis

«Body without organs» revolves around an encounter between the functionality of the surface and delving inside the producing body that operates entirely by respiration, evaporation and fluid transmis-sions. By drawing parallels between the chaos and shapelessness of objects that seem to be losing outlines and melting into one terrain – residing in a state of becoming organs, as well as images of bodies in a state of pain, discomfort and extasy, the project explores the  becoming of the organism itself.

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Johanna Hullar – If I Could Only Be Sure

with Charles Negre

Inspired by the human capacity for emotional transformation and the examination of the still life genre, the project merges a series of still life videos of characterised everyday objects and organic material, creating a collage of different recurring moments and processes in time. The emphasis is on exploring the concept of entropy, making time tangible and capturing the transformation of a moment into its material representation. The project is presented on a 12x2m half-circular projection screen, thus surrounding the viewer with the imagery and allowing for a more visceral experience.

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Nikolai Frerichs – Carrie Ann

by Nikolai Frerichs

The movie Carrie Ann questions the concept of standardisation. Individuality and losing control seem impossible to achieve in digital environments. Nevertheless software developers are constantly trying to build new tools and possibilities to simulate our world as realistically as possible. However, when we take a closer look, we recognise that these tools and representations are full of stereotypes. Is it possible to speak about love in a controlled and unnatural synthetic world? Is our Idea of love just another readymade asset in our mind, formed by the ideals and clichés of the society we live in, or can love resist it? Is it truly something bigger or just a projection of our imagination? Does it have the power to save us from the standardisation of everything?

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Workshop - Charlie Engman

with Milo Keller, Clément Lambelet

"Treatment, Synthesis, and Art Direction" Charlie Engman is an artist, photographer, writer, and art director based in Brooklyn, New York.He works across a range of media and disciplines from gen-AI art, photography, video, and fashion, and balances artistic, commercial, and pedagogical practices. He is the art director of the sustainable fashion brand, Collina Strada, where he is responsible for print design, branding, and runway show design. This workshop will investigate the ways in which media, aesthetics, and culture are interwoven and overlapping and are driven in large part by the accessibility of popular technology. It will also investigate the ways in which creativity is a collaborative and iterative process that bleeds across genre and category. There will be a key focus on the intersection of photography, AI tools, and videogaming / user-driven media.In this workshop, participants are expected to explore and challenge the ways they integrate and synthesize both professional and vernacular registers and new and traditional techniques. This will also serve as an introduction to developing art direction and making “ treatments ” for commissioned projects, and practical experience concepting and executing assignments that can bridge between a distinctive artistic practice and preexisting modes of making and sharing.

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MAP Books 2023

with Bruno Ceschel

These publications are special editions produced within the framework of the Master in Photography at ECAL in 2023 for Bruno Ceschell's Photobook class. This curated selection was later showcased at Offprint during Paris Photo, providing a prestigious platform to exhibit and share the emerging talent in the field of photography.

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Tokyo summer university

with Milo Keller, MAP

In Summer 2019, thirteen students of ECAL Master in Photography  supervised by Milo Keller, traveled to Japan to develop thirteen personal projects in collaboration with Taisuke Koyama and TOKYO PHOTOGRAPHIC RESEARCH. From still and moving images to computer-generated photographic visuals, students’ artworks explore a wide variety of aspects of the Japanese megalopolis which is, once again, undergoing major transformations in preparation for the 2020 Summer Olympic Games. Some projects focus on concrete aspects of the city, from the destruction of small residential houses to the construction of the gigantic Olympic village and the conquest of new territories by the sea. Other works investigate particularities of Japanese culture such as food in a family setting, the desire to generate humanoid robots, the confusion of child and adult worlds in manga, Pichinko Gambling , the reinvention of Ikebana and the rising stars among young girls. Finally, works seek to visualise more abstract concepts such as loneline

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Guardare l’utopia

with Milo Keller, MAP

Utopia is invisible; only utopians can see it. A class of 12 students from the Photography Master at the ECAL/University of Art and Design of Lausanne, in residence at Casa Corti in Pellio, Val d’Intelvi (Italy), elaborated the concepts of utopia and community. Identifying the malaise of a generation trapped in social networks, confused between reality and the virtual sphere, and in need of establishing new values, the group developed a range of different strategies: morning meditation sessions, walks to Monte Generoso, shared meals and discussions to produce photographs and videos which, while gradually shifting away from reality, reach imaginary dimensions that oscillate between utopia and dystopia, figuration and abstraction. --- Students Emidio Battipaglia Robin Bervini Jasmine Deporta Anja Karolina Furrer Alessia Gunawan Christian Harker Johanna Hullár Philipp Klak Doruk Kumkumoglu Jelly Luise Igor Pjörrt Gedvile Tamosiunaite Curator Milo Keller Assistants Florian Amoser Calum Douglas Graphic Design Nicolas Polli biennaleimmagine.ch https://casacorti.org/

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Mirage Club

with Golgotha, MAP

Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) is everywhere. More real than reality, the images created by 3D software are mainly used in the advertising and entertainment  industries. The photorealism of these photographic visuals blurs the boundaries between the real and the virtual. Guided by Golgotha studio, students from the Photography Master’s at ECAL have explored potential advantages and drawbacks of these particular processes by investigating their illusionary powers. During Paris Photo, an immersive installation  will guide visitors through a labyrinthine space, a physical translation of the complexity of our relationship to photographic media. https://vimeo.com/302879066

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Global Market

What does a global city look like? Over the course of one week, thirteen students of the newly-launched Master in Photography program at ECAL/ University of Art and Design of Lausanne, Switzerland were invited by Lorenzo Vitturi to explore London. The city’s diversity makes it unique as a global capital of the arts, economics, scientific and technological research and developments. 37% of the city’s inhabitants were born outsidethe UK, the highest foreign-born population of any city in the world with over 300 languages spoken. London is the contemporary Babel. Each student was assigned a different area of London in orderto engage with, observe and discover the diversity and specificities of various different cultures, contexts and realities. The work presented here is the result of three intensive days of shooting, one night of editing, one day of printing, endingwith a performative presentation during Offprint at Tate Modern, where the images are combined and sequenced in order to reveal a new vision of London. During Offprint, our thirteen students transform into merchants,lowering their prices as the evening approaches to aid in a successful sale, advising their customers not to combine still-lifes with portraits, or not to place studio-lighting next to natural light etc.

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Applied Photography - Fall 2023

with Charles Negre

STILL LIFE PAPER - This course focuses on the ability to answer a commission within its own artistic practice and leading the students through a better understanding of studio photography, challenges of constructed images and their processes. This applied photography course has an emphasis on still life photography, our aim is to sharpen the students sensitivity to photographing and interpreting objects. For this semester, the group of students will develop their own printed magazine focusing on the practice of still life.

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Self-Initiated Project - Fall 2022 - MAP2

by Gina Bolle, Mattia Dagani Rio, Benjamin Freedman, Aniket Godbole, Moritz Jekat, Amandine Kuhlmann, Gabriela Marciniak, Fumi Omori, Carla Rossi, Luísa Tormenta, Mykolas Valantinas, Yuji Wang, Yumo Wu

The second-year students worked on projects that they themselves had initiated, under the direction of Elisa Medde.

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Automated Photography - Autumn 2021

with Marco De Mutiis

2nd year Automated Photography course tutored by Marco De Mutiis.

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Materialized Photography - Spring 2021

with Rachel de Joode

First-year students have been tutored artist Rachel de Joode into using a more plastic approach in the way they conceive and display physical images.

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Self-Initiated Project - Spring 2021 - MAP1

with Bruno Ceschel, MAP

First-year course with Bruno Ceschel

MEDIA & INTERACTION DESIGN

Grand Palais Éphémère - Palais Augmenté

with Robin Bervini, Milo Keller, Kylan Luginbühl, Pauline Saglio

Co-produced by Fisheye and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux - Grand Palais, the Palais Augmenté festival takes place inside the Grand Palais Éphémère. Exceptionally, in partnership with ECAL, augmented reality projects will be accessible from this point, on the façade of the Grand Palais Éphémère on 19 and 20 June 2021.

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citizenM commission

with MAP, Charles Negre

For the applied photography course, first year students were challenged with a commission for citizenM hotels. The students created several images following the client's guidelines. A selection of pictures was then printed as postcards and on plexiglas support to decorate the hotel's rooms. Students: Sara Bastai, Maeva Bosko, Sally Jo, Natalie Maximova, Joanna Wierzbicka, Olivia Wünsche, Manqin Zhang.