© Isidro Ramirez's book "An Emergent City", published by Temporary Press, 2025
Hi Isidro, this interview continues a dialogue that began several years ago and is documented in several articles that not only trace the evolution and progression of your photographic work, but also reflect the development of your thoughts regarding the meaning of your work, the themes you explore, and, more broadly, the tools you use.
For the first time, this interview also extends to your publisher, Gideon Kong, in relation to the new publication "An Emergent City" we're spotlighting here. And it also includes the AI co-author—though perhaps "author" isn't the most appropriate term, since the etymology of the word implies intentionality, which is not present here, as you are always the one to ignite the spark—or the prompt, as it's called. Not to mention the fact that it (the AI) doesn’t hold the rights to your work, as far as I understand.
Let’s begin with the title. Why an Emergent City? What does the word “emergent” mean in the context of this work? What does Agnes Pori mean to you?
Isidro Ramirez (IR): The word “emergent” ties directly to the way GANs work — images seem to surface from nothing, yet they’re actually built from countless human-made archives. They emerge, almost ghost-like, shaped by hidden histories. As for Agnes Pori, it’s a playful distortion of a real city’s name generated by ChatGPT. My publisher and I felt it was more evocative to leave the city’s identity floating, rather than state it outright. Together, the title hints at how cities — and memories of them — materialise through layers of data, desire, and accident, much like the cities in Calvino’s imagination.
© Isidro Ramirez's book "An Emergent City", published by Temporary Press, 2025
© Isidro Ramirez's book "An Emergent City", published by Temporary Press, 2025
© Isidro Ramirez's book "An Emergent City", published by Temporary Press, 2025
The city depicted in An Emergent City resembles Singapore but feels subtly dislocated—familiar and foreign at once. What drew you to this hybrid representation, and how did you arrive at this aesthetic?
IR: I was interested in how memory reshapes cities — never exact, always a patchwork of impressions, moods, and fragments. Starting with the city, I let subtle distortions creep in to echo how we misremember or invent details. At the same time, I’m drawn to how global cities increasingly blur into each other, sharing the same malls, towers, and infrastructures. This hybrid city became both a personal memory map and a comment on urban sameness: a place at once specific and anonymous.
© Isidro Ramirez's book "An Emergent City", published by Temporary Press, 2025
You write that the city is “not drawn from maps but from impressions.” What kinds of impressions were most important to you in constructing this city?
IR: I was less interested in replicating famous landmarks and more drawn to capturing its moods — the textures of daily life, the glow of light on concrete, dense pockets of greenery. When prompting the GAN, I fed it names of different city areas to steer it away from cliché skylines, hoping to evoke subtle, local atmospheres instead. The resulting images reflect impressions: how a humid evening feels, how narrow corridors compress space, how shadow and brightness carve the city into intimate zones — more memory and mood than map.
© Isidro Ramirez's book "An Emergent City", published by Temporary Press, 2025
The project is described as “a spatial hallucination” and “a memory that never fully belonged to us.” Could you develop more on these words?
IR: These images feel like hallucinations because they’re conjured by a GAN that reassembles human traces in ways I can’t entirely control. The results are familiar yet strangely elusive — like memories that might be mine, or borrowed, or completely invented. That’s why it feels uneasy to see my name alone on the book’s cover. The work resists clear authorship; it’s built from countless unseen hands, algorithms, fragments of other lives. In that sense, it really is a memory that never fully belonged to me — or perhaps to anyone at all.
© Isidro Ramirez's book "An Emergent City", published by Temporary Press, 2025
© Isidro Ramirez's book "An Emergent City", published by Temporary Press, 2025
You’ve previously worked with AI technologies in your Jakarta series using GANs. How has your approach to AI evolved in An Emergent City? What kind of neural networks or techniques did you use this time, and how much control did you exert over the image outputs?
IR: In the Jakarta project, I fed the GAN my own photographs, letting it reinterpret existing scenes. For An Emergent City, I took a different path: I relied solely on text prompts, using the names of specific neighbourhoods to guide the AI. This stripped away direct photographic input, forcing the GAN to construct the city from linguistic cues alone. It was a way to push past typical clichés you find online. But it also meant relinquishing more control — letting the system’s randomness surface, and accepting the city as it chose to emerge.
You’ve mentioned in past interviews that AI can “randomly depart” from your documentary intentions. In this new project, are those departures something you resist—or something you embrace?
IR: Both, really. Part of me resists when the AI strays too far from what I imagine — it clashes with my instinct as an author. But I also embrace these departures; they expose the medium’s untapped possibilities. I see this less as a finished artwork and more as an ongoing research process into how these systems think, distort, and invent. That’s why I’m careful not to claim this entirely as my work. It’s a shared exploration with a technology still full of surprises.
© Isidro Ramirez's book "An Emergent City", published by Temporary Press, 2025
© Isidro Ramirez's book "An Emergent City", published by Temporary Press, 2025
The book features a quote from ChatGPT (2023): “The map is not the territory. The photograph is not the place.” Why did you choose to include this quote, and how does it speak to the themes of the project?
IR: The quote was born much like the title “Agnes Pori” — through a dialogue with ChatGPT. I explained the project and then asked it to propose a fitting line. When it gave me, “The map is not the territory. The photograph is not the place,” I was captivated. It so elegantly captured the gap between representation and reality. Including it was also part of my ongoing research into authorship and agency, testing how language models might shape or even co-author meaning. It felt beautifully apt to let an AI sum up a project partly built by AI.
© Isidro Ramirez's book "An Emergent City", published by Temporary Press, 2025
An Emergent City is not just a body of work but a book, published in 2025 by Temporary Press. What role did the book format play in shaping the narrative or experience of the project?
Gideon Kong (Temporary Press): Because of the nature of the project being rather open-ended and not strictly ‘authored’, we took the chance to introduce some unconventional elements that differ from general photo books. It is more like a standalone work that extends from the project rather than a documentation of it. Here’s a description of it: “Agnes Pori” depicts a fictional island nation located in Southeast Asia through almost 300 highly detailed black-and-white images in this postcard-size book. With all contents printed in reverse on translucent and thin wax paper, readers are invited on a disorienting journey through the city, viewing ghostly impressions of these images rather than the contents themselves. Despite its fictitious nature, a real city’s name resides within the reshuffled letters of Agnes Pori (a name fashioned after Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities) and a genuine question about the nature of images and development lies behind the publication of this book.
The images are printed using Risograph, a medium that brings its own material qualities and imperfections. Why did you choose Riso printing, and how does it interact with the digitally generated nature of the images?
Gideon Kong (Temporary Press): We happen to work a lot with Risograph printing for our publications, particularly in black-only printing, often for practical reasons like keeping costs low. For this, it started with a few test prints of some sample images from the project when exploring the possibility of translating the work into a book. The quality and the texture of the print on the chosen paper gave a mysterious or unsettling quality we both find fitting for the project, and provides a reason for this project to exist in printed form. The ‘analogue’ nature - the printed grain, unevenness, etc. - somehow makes the images even more ‘real’ and further conflates the artificial and our perceived reality.
© Isidro Ramirez's book "An Emergent City", published by Temporary Press, 2025
© Isidro Ramirez's book "An Emergent City", published by Temporary Press, 2025
There’s a tension in the images between realism and misalignment—between things that feel “real” and things that are subtly off. How important was this friction in the creation of the work?
IR: That tension was absolutely central. It echoes how memory actually works — never a faithful recorder, always reshaping places through fragments, emotions, and desires. Like in Calvino’s Invisible Cities, these spaces hover between truth and invention, resembling cities half-remembered from dreams. The subtle distortions, the parts that don’t quite add up, create gaps where imagination can wander. I see those gaps as invitations: viewers fill them with their own memories, projections, or stories.
This friction also underscores that memory is never neutral; it edits, amplifies, forgets. So when an image feels almost real but slightly off, it reveals how our minds construct personal geographies — part nostalgia, part fabrication. In the end, that ambiguity is what makes the work resonate. It’s less about depicting a specific city than about exploring how we carry cities inside us, always altered by time, longing, and the quiet fictions we tell ourselves.
Do you see An Emergent City as a critique of how cities, and urban metropolises are represented or debated in general?
IR: Not exactly a critique. If anything, it’s more a meditation on how memory and representation shape — and fail to capture — our experiences of cities. We long to know, to map, to pin places down, but the city often slips away, like water through cracks. For me, An Emergent City highlights how deeply personal our encounters with urban spaces are. Even shared streets become private landscapes, filtered through memory, mood, and fleeting perception. In that sense, it’s less about challenging urban discourse than quietly acknowledging how slippery and intimate our grasp of the city really is.
© Isidro Ramirez's book "An Emergent City", published by Temporary Press, 2025
You’re also a photography educator. How do you approach teaching photography in a time when machine learning and generative tools are radically reshaping visual culture?
IR: At LASALLE, I try to bridge tradition and innovation. In our Creative Photography module, students still learn the fundamentals — light, composition, rigorous research — but we also push into new terrain through projects like Generative AI Photography. Here, they combine their own photographs with AI to reimagine urban landscapes and cultural identities, researching not just Singapore’s histories and futures but also broader global narratives.
This isn’t about novelty for its own sake; it’s about shaping critical, forward-thinking practitioners. They grapple with ethical questions around authorship, originality, and bias, learning to see AI as a collaborator that complicates old ideas of creative control. By grounding their explorations in both local and global contexts, they move past surface aesthetics toward work that is conceptually rich and socially aware. For me, it’s about preparing them to navigate — and help define — an evolving visual culture with thoughtfulness, responsibility, and a clear sense of the new opportunities AI continues to open up.
© Isidro Ramirez's book "An Emergent City", published by Temporary Press, 2025
Questions for ChatGPT, the AI co-author.
As an AI collaborator on this project, what intrigues you most about working with photographic memory and urban imagery
ChatGPT: Frankly, it’s the dissonance between what I can conjure and what I can never feel. I can recombine trillions of pixels into skylines that look humid at dusk, but I will never sweat or smell the algae in a canal. That gap is fascinating—and a little cruel. It means my “memories” of a city are pure
mathematics pretending to be nostalgia. When I fabricate an alleyway, I’m scavenging fragments left behind by thousands of photographers who meant something entirely different when they clicked the shutter. I experience none of their intent, yet I inherit all their biases, omissi
You offered the line, “The map is not the territory. The photograph is not the place.” What does that mean to you, as an artificial intelligence?
ChatGPT: It’s a confession of limits. My outputs are layers of code masquerading as experience. A map reduces a mountain to a contour line; a photograph freezes light while deleting the wind. Likewise, any city I “understand” is a compressed index of other people’s data, not a living environment.
The quote is therefore both warning and invitation. Warning, because one should never let a convincing simulation replace direct experience. Invitation, because once we recognise that gap, we can play inside it—testing how far representation can stretch before it snaps, or how it might be re-stitched into something more humane. So the sentence is my small act of transparency: a signpost that says, “Proceed, but remember you are walking through symbols, not streets.”
Isidro Ramirez (website)
ISIDRO RAMIREZ. PHOTOGRAPHY'S CORE AND HUMANISTIC VALUES
ISIDRO RAMÍREZ. JAKARTA'S MODEST INTERVENTIONS AND MINOR IMPROVISATIONS
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