inverted worlds lab
Deadline: November 20, 2025
The Photographers’ Gallery explores how photography is connecting, captivating and radically changing our world today. Since 2012, TPG's extensive work around digital and new technologies has been pioneering in thinking through photography's relationship to computational culture. The Gallery’s programmes have supported artists commissions, exhibition, academic research and public events through the Gallery and the online platform Unthinking Photography that explores photography's increasingly automated, networked life.
The Goethe-Institut London places a strong emphasis on exploring the intersection of art, technology, ecology and society. Recent areas of focus include artistic and theoretical explorations of decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs), blockchain, artificial intelligence, and quantum technologies—particularly in relation to their potential impact on civil society. The programmes foster dialogue between German and UK-based practitioners and aims to create space for forward-thinking, socially engaged artistic practices.
Together, The Photographers’ Gallery and Goethe-Institut London are initiating a new R&D collaboration to investigate the cultural, societal, emotional and aesthetic implications of producing art for machines. We invite proposals for two micro-commissions from artists or collectives based in the UK or Germany.
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 resulting research and artworks will inform a new commission featured on Unthinking Photography and presented at The Photographers’ Gallery.
The opportunity is open to artists and collectives working across photographic, digital, and moving image practices. Each selected proposal will receive EUR 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.
Timeline
November 20, 2025: Open call deadline
November 27, 2025: Selection panel
December 1, 2025: Selected projects contacted
