HECTARE is pleased to present “COGNITOGRAPHY,” a solo exhibition by artist and photographer Taro Karibe. For nearly two centuries, photography has functioned as a medium for recording reality and serving as evidence of truth. Today, however, the emergence of generative AI has made it possible to produce photorealistic images without the use of a camera, fundamentally challenging our assumptions about what photography is.

In this exhibition, Karibe introduces the concept of Cognitography, a new photographic practice that responds to this shift. Rather than depicting reality itself, Cognitography seeks to visualize the underlying structures through which both humans and machines perceive, interpret, and construct images of the world.

In the new series “Latent Image,” Kazimir Malevich's “Black Square”—a work that radically redefined the act of seeing—is brought into dialogue with nineteenth-century French painting within the latent space of a generative AI model. The resulting grid-like traces reveal, almost like an X-ray, the internal process through which AI recognizes and reconstructs images. At the same time, these structures parallel the ways in which human vision organizes and interprets visual information. The work ultimately reveals the shared foundations underlying the act of seeing in both humans and machines.

Another new work, “Sinfonietta of Shashin-Modoki,” takes historically influential fake photographs as its point of departure to examine photography's inherent fictionality and the social mechanisms through which we come to believe something to be “real.” Here, generative AI is employed not as the primary creator of images, but as a means of connecting disparate visual fragments into a single composition.

Just as the invention of photography liberated painting from its representational function, Karibe suggests that the emergence of generative AI marks a comparable turning point for photography itself. Rather than asking what photography has been, “COGNITOGRAPHY” invites us to reconsider what photography can become—and, ultimately, to reflect on the very act of seeing.