Hydrangea studies for situated knowledge

Hydrangea Studies for Situated Knowledge recreates the aesthetics of lumen prints through AI-generated imagery and synthetic photographic processes. Historically, lumen prints function as traces of physical reality: they are altered by sunlight, humidity, temperature, time, handling, and environmental conditions. Each image emerges from a situated encounter between body, material, and climate. This project digitally simulates those unstable processes to expose what artificial image generation cannot experience. While AI can imitate the visual language of solar photography, it cannot inhabit the physical conditions that produce it. The system generates traces of an embodied experience it never had. Using hydrangeas as speculative specimens, the work reflects on contextual perception and unstable forms of knowledge. Like the flowers themselves, whose color shifts according to the chemistry of their soil, the images resist fixed identity and challenge the illusion of neutrality in generated visual culture. Referencing Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge, the series questions what happens when systems without bodies begin producing images that imitate evidence, memory, and truth.