ISBN 978-623-90446-4-0-X Bandung, Unobtainium Photobooks - Bandung Photography Triennale 2025 Bandung, September 2025
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BPT25 - Synthetic Vision 02
ARTSOCIATES CURATORIAL INTRODUCTION
SYNTHETIC VISION: SYNTHETIC MUSINGS
Rifky Effendy
ARTISTS
ORBITAL
DAGO CURATORIAL INTRODUCTION
SYNTHETIC VISION:
SYNTHETIC
MUSINGS
In the era of synthetic reality—when reality is mediated, shaped, or even generated by AI, VR, AR, simulations, and deepfakes—art often risks becoming spectacle, effect, or hyperreality. Yet within this condition lies possibility. Synthetic artworks can provoke strangeness, ambiguity, even paradox—moments that compel viewers to pause, fall silent, and reflect. An AI work mimicking “emotion,” for example, prompts us to ask: is this authenticity, or only projection?
Contemplation arises not from the medium itself but from how human consciousness processes experience. A cave painting can be contemplative, just as much as an AI-driven installation. Though artificial in form, art can invite reflection and deep awareness. If synthetic reality tends toward instant consumption and shallow aesthetics, its awareness may lead us instead toward reflection on technology, perception, and illusion. In this way, contemplation becomes not just possible but urgent.
Photography has a particular role here. Long seen as a mirror of reality, it now operates in a world where reality itself can be fabricated through AI imagery, deepfake, or CGI. Photography no longer simply records—it creates. Synthetic photography becomes contemplative not for documenting the real, but for questioning our relationship to it.
Philosophers anticipated this shift. Jean Baudrillard described a hyperreality where signs refer only to other signs. Walter Benjamin noted the loss of “aura” in mass reproduction; today, we confront production without origin. Vilém Flusser argued that apparatuses shape perception; in our time, AI and algorithms are the new apparatus. Contemplation now means not seeking the authentic against the false, but finding depth within the illusions we inhabit.
The seven artists presented at Orbital Dago embody this contemplative possibility. Their works—quiet landscapes, impossible faces—open spaces of silence, ambiguity, and reflection. In a world saturated with simulation, they remind us to search for meaning beneath layers of the artificial.
Rifky Effendy
ARTIST
AKKARA NAKTAMNA – THAILAND
Short biography
Akkara Naktamna (b. 1979, Bangkok) is a photo artist and curator whose work has been shown internationally at festivals including PhotoBangkok, the Singapore International Photo Festival, the Miami Street Photography Festival, and the Dali International Photo Festival. His photobook Signs was presented at the NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 and is now held in the Franklin Furnace Archive and the MoMA Library. In 2016, Akkara founded CTypeMag and later opened a gallery in Bangkok to support emerging and overlooked voices in photography. He has curated exhibitions at MOCA and BACC and currently works as curator at Kathmandu Photo Gallery.
Project Statement
Ordinary People reflects on the intersection of photography and artificial intelligence, where images generated by machines blur the boundary between the real and the fabricated. Akkara Naktamna uses simple prompts to call forth AI depictions of anonymous, everyday individuals—eerily ordinary portraits resembling ID photos from across cultures. These uncanny yet familiar results are then cycled back into AI, transforming images into text and text back into images, probing the nature of memory, origin, and identity in a data-driven age. The work critiques AI’s tendency toward utopian uniformity, where diversity collapses into a strangely serene world—peaceful, beautiful, but unsettlingly homogeneous.
BOBBY DAVIDSON – USA
Short biography
Bobby Davidson (b. 1982) is a New York–based artist and cinematographer whose practice spans painting, sculpture, film, and virtual reality. Working across physical and digital realms, he constructs a lineage of works that extend beyond singular dimensions, exploring the tension and continuity between material and immaterial worlds. His work has been exhibited at institutions including MoMA PS1, The Museum of Modern Art, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, SCAD Museum of Art, The Alabama Contemporary Art Center, Tsinghua University, and the Aperture Foundation. Davidson’s works are held in the permanent collections of SCAD Museum of Art, Yale University, and The New School.
Project Statement
In A Noiseless Patient Spider, Davidson examines the collapse of photographic truth in an era increasingly defined by synthetic AI imagery. Drawing on conceptual strategies of artists such as Robert Cumming and the collaborative practice of Sultan and Mandel, he reconstructs and invents scenes that blur the thresholds of memory, fabrication, and perception. Using discarded 3D stock models and digital remnants as raw material, he assembles layered tableaux where plausibility coexists with quiet impossibility. These hybrid images, oscillating between DIY engineering aesthetics and internet-born vernaculars, destabilize visual certainty while opening a space of generative skepticism. Davidson reframes photography’s instability not as loss but as curiosity, proposing vision itself as a shifting terrain shaped by technological mediation.
HE BO – CHINA
Short biography
He Bo (b. 1989, Sichuan, China) is a photographic artist, writer, curator, and educator whose work investigates the intersections of image, memory, and power. Holding MAs in Photography from Beijing Film Academy (2015) and in Photography & Society from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (2023), his practice engages with ready-made images, the fictionality of archives, and the entanglement of trauma, history, and post-memory. Collaboration and audience participation remain central to his process. He Bo’s works have been exhibited internationally, including in Amsterdam, London, New York, Frankfurt, and at major festivals such as Lianzhou Foto and Jimei × Arles. His accolades include the 1839 Photography Award (2023), Pingyao International Photography Festival awards, and a Verzasca Residency (2022)..
Project Statement
Farewell to the Stream (of…) (2022) reflects on memory, displacement, and the fragile act of holding onto place across distance. During a residency in the Valle Verzasca, Switzerland, the mountainous landscape evoked for He Bo the Western Sichuan Plateau of his childhood, stirring homesickness entwined with friendship and shared journeys. Inviting friends to send him photographs of Sichuan landscapes, he used brushes from his childhood training in Chinese painting, dipping them into local stream water to redraw those distant scenes onto rocks. Each ephemeral image evaporated almost immediately, leaving only photographic fragments that were later reassembled. The work becomes a meditation on transience, belonging, and the fragile convergence of memory, geography, and friendship. Acknowledgements to the original photographers: Yang Lisha, Wang Jianyu and Wang Weirong, and to Wo Ruojia.
JIM ALLEN ABEL – INDONESIA
Short biography
Jim Allen Abel (b. 1975, Luwu, Indonesia), also known as Jimbo, is a visual artist whose practice spans photography, video, and installation. Trained in interior design before earning a degree in photography from the Indonesia Institute of Art, Yogyakarta, Abel explores the intersections of history, landscape, and human intervention with a critical yet subtly humorous lens. His works reinterpret traces of memory and transformation within contemporary terrains, a perspective articulated in exhibitions such as Vertikal Horizon (2019, ArtSociates, Yogyakarta), The Mastodon Came in Through My Bathroom Window (2013, Element Art Space, Singapore), and The Others (2013, Art Stage Singapore). He has also participated in Art Jog (2015–2018), international biennials, and received recognition at the Bandung Contemporary Art Award #2 (2012).
Project Statement
Makan Tak Makan–Makan Asal Kumpul reconsiders the well-known Javanese idiom “mangan ora mangan sing penting kumpul” (“whether we eat or not, the important thing is being together”). What may sound poetic or even comforting reveals its darker resonance when confronted with the stark realities of social and economic inequality in Indonesia. The work interrogates the contradiction of communal togetherness amidst scarcity: can hunger be soothed by the mere act of gathering? Juxtaposing cultural tradition with contemporary struggles—low wages, systemic poverty, and the absurdity of official statistics that deny lived hardship—the project frames collective survival as both resilience and delusion. It proposes that hope often becomes our only sustenance, a fragile oxygen that keeps skeletal lives breathing in shared illusion.
ROMINA HERRERA – ARGENTINA / GERMANY
Short biography
Romina Herrera (b. 1979, Buenos Aires) is an artist whose work explores organic structures, physicality, and vulnerability, often drawing attention to essential but overlooked processes in society. After initial studies in philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires, she moved to Germany, where she trained in languages and worked in various fields while also teaching yoga and meditation for over 15 years. She studied Fine Arts at HBK Braunschweig, first in photography and video before graduating in sound art under Franziska Windisch in 2023, later completing her Meisterschüler degree with Jens Brand in 2024. Her work has been shown at Kunstverein Braunschweig, Burg Galerie Halle, and the HBK, among others.
Project Statement
Chromatic Analysis of Breast Milk reflects on the intersection of care, embodiment, and temporality through the intimate material of unconsumed pumped breast milk. The work originates from a bottle collected by a doctor whose professional life was suspended while tending to her infant’s medical needs. By conducting a chromatic study of the milk, Herrera examines the paradox of the body as both fragile and powerful—a vital resource for others. Photography becomes a tool to register time, absence, and presence, while the accompanying soundscape—audible actions of the pumping process transmitted through headphones—adds a visceral layer. Together, image and sound foreground care as a collective, social condition rather than an individual burden.
WUTTHICHAI AINCHU – THAILAND
Short biography
Wutthichai (b. Khlong Lan District, Kamphaeng Phet Province) grew up in one of Thailand’s most remote regions, bordering the Western Forest Complex, an environment shaped by cultural diversity. His early interest in the lives and stories of people led him to photography, which he pursued more deeply after studying Creative Photography at Chiang Mai University. His practice investigates the intersections of memory, spirit, place, and time, with photography as both a mirror of inner landscapes and a tool for self-discovery. While grounded in photography, his work often expands into mixed media, installation, video, documentary, and experimental forms, engaging themes of environment, oral histories, and music.
Project Statement
Finding the Rainbow is an experimental photography project that reconstructs the absent memory of my grandmother, Sairung—whose name means “Rainbow” in Thai—yet whose face was never captured in a photograph. Through collected stories from relatives and neighbors, I transformed fragments of recollection into simulated portraits, layering images and emotions to create shifting visages both familiar and estranged. Rather than searching for a single likeness, the work probes the fragility of memory and the limits of photography, revealing how remembrance folds time and space, and how images can both preserve and invent the traces of a life once lived.
Short biography
Zhang Xiao (b. 1981, Yantai, China) is a photographer whose work navigates the shifting landscapes of contemporary China through documentary and experimental approaches. A graduate of Yantai University’s Department of Architecture and Design, he worked as a photojournalist before pursuing independent projects that earned him international recognition. He received the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography at Harvard University (2018), the Prix HSBC pour la Photographie (2011), the Three Shadows Photography Award (2010), and the Hou Dengke Documentary Photography Award (2009). His work has been shown at institutions including the Peabody Museum (Harvard), Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Fotostiftung Schweiz, Quai Branly Museum, and Lianzhou Photography Museum. He lives and works in Chengdu, China.
Project Statement
The Twelve Zodiac Bodhisattvas extends Zhang Xiao’s long-standing exploration of Chinese folk society into the realm of folk religion, drawing on the Analects’ phrase Guai Li Luan Shen—extraordinary powers, rebellion, ghosts, and gods. Through inventing strange, contemporary deities, Zhang reveals how rural belief systems shift, mutate, and absorb the desires of everyday people. These figures, raw and kitsch, embody a collective unconscious that seeks comfort, meaning, and release within China’s rapid social and economic transformation. Neither criticism nor celebration, the work registers a living archive of grassroots faith, where tradition and improvisation collide in powerful, uncanny forms.
ZHANG XIAO – CHINA
ARTWORKS
Ordinary People
22 Artworks, print, 21.6 x 27 cm & 48 x 60 cm, 2024
AKKARA NAKTAMNA
A Noiseless Patient Spider
06 Artworks, print, 50.8 x 50.8 cm, 2024
BOBBY DAVIDSON
Farewell to the Stream (of…)
09 Artworks, print, various sizes, 2022
Tak Makan Makan yang Penting Kumpul I
01 Artworks, print, 110 x 150 cm, 2025
JIM ALLEN ABEL
Chromatic Analysis of Breast Milk
01 Artworks, print, 200 x 150 cm, 2024
ROMINA HERRERA
Finding the Rainbow
04 Artworks, print, various sizes, 2023 - 2025
The Twelve Zodiac Bodhisattvas 12 Artworks, print, 56 x 40 cm, 2022
ZHANG XIAO
House of Bandung Photography Triennale
Jalan Cigadung Raya Barat no. 20K
Bandung 40191
www.bandungphotographytriennale.com
SYNTHETIC VISION: SYNTHETIC MUSINGS
In the era of synthetic reality—when reality is mediated, shaped, or even generated by AI, VR, AR, simulations, and deepfakes—art often risks becoming spectacle, effect, or hyperreality. Yet within this condition lies possibility. Synthetic artworks can provoke strangeness, ambiguity, even paradox—moments that compel viewers to pause, fall silent, and reflect. An AI work mimicking “emotion,” for example, prompts us to ask: is this authenticity, or only projection?
Contemplation arises not from the medium itself but from how human consciousness processes experience. A cave painting can be contemplative, just as much as an AI-driven installation. Though artificial in form, art can invite reflection and deep awareness. If synthetic reality tends toward instant consumption and shallow aesthetics, its awareness may lead us instead toward reflection on technology, perception, and illusion. In this way, contemplation becomes not just possible but urgent.
Photography has a particular role here. Long seen as a mirror of reality, it now operates in a world where reality itself can be fabricated through AI imagery, deepfake, or CGI. Photography no longer simply records—it creates. Synthetic photography becomes contemplative not for documenting the real, but for questioning our relationship to it.
Philosophers anticipated this shift. Jean Baudrillard described a hyperreality where signs refer only to other signs. Walter Benjamin noted the loss of “aura” in mass reproduction; today, we confront production without origin. Vilém Flusser argued that apparatuses shape perception; in our time, AI and algorithms are the new apparatus. Contemplation now means not seeking the authentic against the false, but finding depth within the illusions we inhabit.
The seven artists presented at Orbital Dago embody this contemplative possibility. Their works—quiet landscapes, impossible faces—open spaces of silence, ambiguity, and reflection. In a world saturated with simulation, they remind us to search for meaning beneath layers of the artificial.
