For years, my camera was a tool for selection. An act of witness. From my window, I watched the sky’s continuous story and chose to quote a single moment, a single arrangement of light and form. The photograph was a testament: this happened, just so. It was an assertion against the ceaseless flow of time.

Then, in 2022, I invited a new kind of collaborator into my studio. Not a person, but an algorithm—a DCGAN. I offered it my chosen moments, the photographs from my window, not as examples to be copied, but as memories to be dreamt.

The machine does not select. It calculates. It digests the images I gave it, not as views of a sky, but as matrices of numbers, containers of pixels. And from this numerical memory, it begins to generate its own. Almost at once, my relationship with the camera, with the act of looking itself, was fractured.

To see new versions of my own chosen images—images I had once believed to be singular—blossom from a seed of digital randomness is to be profoundly re-educated. An image, I now understand in a way that is almost physical, is not a slice of the world. It is a possibility made visible.

One day, I let the machine dream for an unusually long time, for 1500 epochs. It was like watching geology in fast-forward. Forms emerged from the static, held their breath for a moment, and then dissolved again. A sky I recognized from a Tuesday in May would appear, only to curdle into a darkness of a kind I had never witnessed, something gothic and strange. The view was not of the past, but of every possible past and future, flickering in and out of existence.

There is a feeling that I have been fooled. That my belief in the photograph as a relic of a specific moment was a kind of romanticism. The machine shows me that from the same source—from the same nothingness of random data—any sky can be born.

My camera now sits on a shelf. Its silence is a question. Why choose one moment when the machine can show you all of them at once? The world outside my window has not changed. The light still falls. The clouds still gather. But the way of seeing it has been irrevocably multiplied. And in this multiplication, the singular image has lost its authority, perhaps forever.