Sophie Auger — Apophatic Art Practice and Research

third-image-archive.net

third-image-archive.net is an in-progress research and website exploring the oral tradition of ekphrasis and the generative interplay between text and image. Ekphrasis is traditionally understood as the verbal representation of a visual representation: language that evokes an image in the mind of a listener. The project revisits this tradition through an interactive platform that stages an encounter between spoken language and a photographic archive.

As a text is read aloud, a local AI model selects and displays images from a photographic archive in real time—previously interpreted and tagged by participants—like dynamic footnotes. These images do not illustrate the text but form constellations of visual references, generating indirect, associative relationships.

The project is explicitly generative rather than descriptive : words and images exist within networks of probable relations rather than fixed correspondences. Ekphrasis is used in reverse : the text does not describe a specific image, and the images are not visual representations of the text. This cultivated gap encourages creative thought while negotiating between sensory regimes.

A future phase of third-image-archive.net will be developed collaboratively with students at the University of Quebec in Montreal, incorporating their contributions into the tagging and interpretation of photographs. By combining AI, human curation, and archival material, the project explores how programmed randomness can generate unexpected connections.

Sophie Auger is an artist, designer, and professor at École de Design at the University of Quebec in Montréal. Her practice centers on speculative design, hybrid forms of publishing, creative coding, circuit bending, and video installations. She holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Design from Mason Gross School of the Arts (2022) and has been an artist-in-residence at VU Photo and La Chambre Blanche (Québec), Can Serrat (Catalonia), and Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been presented at ELEKTRA (Montréal), Index Space (New York), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), Nuisance Gallery (New Jersey), and the MUU Contemporary Art Center (Helsinki). She is the author of Spiral Engineering (Quickbooks, 2024), distributed by Unnameable Books, 192 Books, and Draw Down Books.

After teaching experimental technology courses at Rutgers University, Parsons School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, School of Visual Arts, and Index Space, and serving as a visiting critic and lecturer at Columbia GSAPP, Bard, Pratt, and Drew University, she is currently a visiting professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal.