Around 2011 and 2012, Schoerner found himself transfixed by the updated Google Image Search grid \u2013 its particular, slightly uncanny layout; the way results bled from the precise to the oblique. \u201cIt was a complete impending overflow,\u201d he recalls, \u201cand that somehow led me to question my practice. What could be the point of making another image and just adding to that flood?\u201d At the same time, he had just wrapped Third Life, his acclaimed book with Violette Editions and Thames & Hudson. But rather than reaching for the camera again, he chose to take his practice apart entirely.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Working with Amazon Mechanical Turk \u2013 a crowdsourced labour platform whose very name echoes one of technology\u2019s oldest sleights of hand \u2013 Schoerner distributed a database of found images to anonymous online workers, each returning between five and ten written descriptions per image. These ranged from the monosyllabic and literal to the richly embellished, revealing as much about their authors as about the images themselves. Some catalogued methodically, almost \u201cpainting by numbers\u201d; others bypassed the literal entirely, instinctively reading the emotional temperature of a scene. Once the responses were in, he deleted the source images \u2013 and hasn\u2019t returned to them since \u2013 spending around a month doing what he calls \u201csemantic layering\u201d: collating and recombining the descriptions until the original photograph became less a record of fact than a catalyst for imagination.<\/p>\n
In deleting the images, the project begins to turn on itself, touching on something Schoerner has been circling since first encountering Baudrillard in the early 2000s: the tension between representation and simulation. He is careful to stress this isn\u2019t about gatekeeping, but about how images are increasingly processed without being absorbed \u2013\u00a0producing simulations rather than responses; performing within parameters of audience legibility rather than expressing anything genuinely felt. \u201cWe\u2019ve lost a true sense of self,\u201d he says. And if that felt like a creeping cultural malaise in 2011, the decade that followed proved him right.\u00a0<\/p>\n When people ask Schoerner about his relationship with AI (and they inevitably do), his answer remains rather unresolved. He uses it pragmatically and finds certain applications genuinely thrilling, but his deeper unease is harder to shake. \u201cThe horse had already bolted long before anyone was calling it out,\u201d he says. What troubles him most is not the technology itself but its social consequences: the way it runs on systems set by a rapidly expanding technological complex, even as it narrows the language through which we understand the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/a>
![\"Aura:](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/471706.jpeg\")
Aura: Collaborations with Human and Other Minds 2011-2023Courtesy of Norbert Schoerner<\/p>\n
![\"Aura:](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/471709.jpg\")
Aura: Collaborations with Human and Other Minds 2011-2023Courtesy of Norbert Schoerner<\/p>\n