To Dream a Night, Gently, Through a Glass, Darkly

Thomas Martin – To Dream a Night, Gently, Through a Glass, Darkly

To Dream a Night, Gently, Through a Glass, Darkly explores the fear of losing sight, rooted in a personal risk, and utilizes it as a metaphor for a broader loss of clarity, belief, and imagination. Through generative AI images and the appropriation of mass-media AI misinformation imagery, the work takes the form of both a book and a site-specific video installation. The project stages an unstable world where looking no longer guarantees understanding. It considers how neural media, political anxiety and apocalyptic narratives shape what we see, believe and imagine. This project asks whether blindness can become a form of protection, and what it means to keep looking when the future itself appears in collapse, obscured and hallucinatory.

Diploma project (2026)

Students
Thomas Martin
ToDreamANight,Gently,ThroughAGlass,Darkly_ECAL_ThomasMartin_2_compressed.jpeg
ToDreamANight,Gently,ThroughAGlass,Darkly_ECAL_ThomasMartin_3_compressed.jpeg
ToDreamANight,Gently,ThroughAGlass,Darkly_ECAL_ThomasMartin_4_compressed.jpeg

Projets similaires

Workshop - Rachel de Joode - 2026

MA PHOTOGRAPHY

Workshop - Rachel de Joode - 2026

with Rachel de Joode, Clément Lambelet

For this workshop, ECAL invited Rachel de Joode, Berlin-based artist whose practice explores the relationship between photography, sculpture, and digital images. During the week, students experimented with transforming photographic images into three-dimensional forms. Starting from simple concepts, they produced or gathered image material intended for printing and treated images as surfaces to cut, fold, layer, and assemble into sculptural objects. Through rapid tests and material experimentation, the workshop encouraged students to move repeatedly between image, surface, object, and documentation. By working with printing, scale, and spatial placement, they explored how photographic images can gain physical presence and occupy space beyond the screen.

Self-Initiated Project - Fall 2025 - MAP2

MA PHOTOGRAPHY

Self-Initiated Project - Fall 2025 - MAP2

with Elisa Medde

This module assists the students to develop into a finalized work a project that further expands their interests and research. The module gives the opportunity to take some of the ideas, skills and themes explores in the first semester and make into a brand new work that can take any possible form: a book, an installation, an online project, a performance.

Materialized Photography - Fall 2025 - MAP2

MA PHOTOGRAPHY

Materialized Photography - Fall 2025 - MAP2

with Mazaccio & Drowilal

The purpose of this class is to examine the relationships between photography — in a context shaped by the digital — and its various modes of display. Students will have to consider what a photograph may be materially and explore how an image’s meaning is derived from both the mode of its distribution and the material form that it assumes. Although the final outcome has to include photography in a third dimensional way ( installation ), projects may use and combine image-based practices such as digital photography, collage, CGI, projection, printmaking, sculpture, objects, or performance, to encourage an expanded approach to photographic practice. The idea is to challenge the different types of engagement possible with pictures today.

Soft Photography - Fall 2025 - MAP2

MA PHOTOGRAPHY

Soft Photography - Fall 2025 - MAP2

with Marco De Mutiis

The course, tutored by Marco De Mutiis, explored how emotions are being exploited and transformed by social media practices and aesthetics (e.g. influencer photography and CGI, operational beauty and weaponized cuteness), as well as through recent image technologies (e.g. generative AI platforms and text-to-image services).

Workshop - Simone C Niquille - 2025

MA PHOTOGRAPHY

Workshop - Simone C Niquille - 2025

with Simone Niquille, Milo Keller, Clément Lambelet

For this workshop, ECAL invited Simone C Niquille, Swiss designer and researcher based in Amsterdam whose practice investigates how digital images, computer vision, and 3D technologies shape the way bodies and objects are represented in contemporary visual culture. Through her research platform Technoflesh, Niquille examines the infrastructures behind digital imagery (from stock images and 3D assets to machine vision systems) and the cultural assumptions embedded in them. Her work reveals how datasets, rendering software, and visual standards influence how bodies, materials, and environments are modeled and understood.

Related courses

Unlisted page: accessible only by direct link, hidden from the site and search results.