ENGINE-V3.5

Installation and lecture performance at Chemist Gallery London. Curated by Chemist and Rebecca Edwards as part of Variations. 2025

As a precursor to Felicity Hammond’s V4: Repository' at Stills in Edinburgh later this year, and as an afterward to V3: Model Collapse at The Photographer's gallery in June 2025, ENGINE-V3.5 at Chemist interjects into Hammond’s computational imaging feedback loop as a moment for reflexive re-classification. It explores how optical, material and computational data, collected from the previous three chapters of ‘Variations’, Hammond’s PhotoWorks commission, can be funnelled into an imagined configuration - a structure of loading bays, printouts and storage systems - to house data-as-research. Reinterpreting the relationship between prompts and images through the lens of AI and asking what happens when the image, not the prompt, comes first?

In this iteration, the exhibition introduces Engine, an imaginary corporation that specialises in the intelligent classification and management of both physical and digital data. Hammond will use Engine's fictional flagship platform, E-V3.5, to map the full extent of the physical and digital trails of the previous variations of this project. The resulting inventory will be produced through Engine's advanced system: one which mimics machine classification via human cognition.

Built over the course of four process-driven weeks, ENGINE-V3.5 begins by positioning the image not as a result but as a provocation: a starting point from which archives are built, knowledge systems recalibrated and new forms of inquiry and meaning might become visible. The image is approached as blueprint, as residue, as ghost file; its data, manifesting through physical, tangible objects,and traces that infer authorship and disclose intentionality. In a process that is both reverse engineering and supervised classification, ENGINE-V3.5 breaks from cloud-based computational systems that are blackboxed and inaccessible, giving precedence to a process where data re-emerges as something weighty and precarious. Stacked, stored, reconfigured in space. These materialisations expose hidden labour and extractive economies that underpin digital production, while simultaneously opening speculative pathways for reimagining how archives might be built and sustained.

The exhibition becomes both a warehouse and a testing ground, a place where images prompt architectures, where prompts generate image collapse, and where the flows of digital culture are made graspable, fragile and strange. ENGINE-V3.5 invites access to a living, shifting repository where images are not endpoints but coordinates in mapping how digital photographic material makes its journey from mineral to pixel; and from beneath the Earth’s surface to the screen.