Exhibition view: When Form Becomes Attitude, 01.09.2024-05.10.2024, SUNSET, Scheveningen, curated by FORM.

June 27, 2025

Fakewhale in Dialogue with FORM Space: A New Curatorial Syntax for Generative Visuality

In today’s hyper-documented landscape of contemporary art, where photography and video often risk flattening or “cooling down” the experience of the work, a radical curatorial project has emerged that reconfigures this relationship entirely. In their projects, documentation is not treated as a separate or secondary layer, but as a fundamental and inseparable component of the artwork, woven into both the artistic process and the viewer’s experience, especially in digital environments. Often performative, process-based, and shaped by emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, this approach rethinks how art is made visible and experienced, particularly online.

Fakewhale had the opportunity to speak with FORM Space, a curatorial project based in the Netherlands between Amsterdam and Wageningen, and the curators behind this pioneering platform, which challenges our current understanding of the dynamic relationship between the artwork and its trace, between presence and persistence in the digital realm.

Fakewhale: How do you approach the idea of documentation as an integrated and constitutive element of the work, rather than a separate entity?

FORM: The point is simple, yet consistently overlooked by the art world: today, documentation has become inseparable from the artwork.
We live in an era where most people encounter art through images, fragments, excerpts, digital flows. The “authentic” artwork, housed in a white cube, is often an elite, isolated, and fleeting experience. But documentation isn’t, it’s ubiquitous, persistent, replicable, from traditional magazines to contemporary omnipresent blogs.
To stop treating documentation as a technical afterthought and begin to consider it as a creative language, as a curatorial gesture, is to redistribute both responsibility and possibility.
The artist is no longer just the author of the work: they become the co-author of its media presence and temporal persistence. The curator doesn’t just arrange or write, they build systems of visibility, encode experiences, and manipulate presence.
And the viewer? The viewer becomes an active reader, of layers, remixes, interpolations. They no longer “see” the artwork, but navigate through a multiplicity of possible versions of it.
Those who still consider documentation a “surrogate” or a “record” are simply revealing their inability to read the present moment.

Your project positions itself as the first curatorial space to systematically employ artificial intelligence in working with documentation.
How do you envision AI’s role: as a technical tool, a co-author, or a critical agent?

All three. And crucially: none of them passively.
For us, AI isn’t a smart printer, or a tool for fast image generation. It’s a language, a collaborator, even a productive anomaly.
As a technical tool, we’re interested in AI’s capacity to break down conventional visual codes: altering scale, time, point of view. But the point isn’t just the “cool” effect, it’s about building new perceptual grammars.
As a co-author, AI intervenes in the images we feed it performatively. The outcome is a controlled mutation, a re-production. It doesn’t document the artwork, it documents the relationship between the artwork and its context, between what’s visible and what could be.
As a critical agent, AI exposes the mechanisms of documentation itself. We often work with it on a textual level as well, and unsurprisingly, the results are consistently powerful.
Art needs to be narrated and explained, accompanying texts are part of the documentation. This isn’t just a visual matter.

The implicit question is: what are we talking about when we say “image”?
What is an installation, for example, if every image, every perspective of it, reinvents it?
If contemporary art fears AI, it’s because AI forces art to ask whether it’s still alive.

You’ve stated that you’re interested in “all strategies and codes that break with traditional uses of artistic documentation.”
Can you give us some concrete examples of these unconventional approaches in your project? And what kind of visual narrative do they create?

To start with: we challenge the notion that documentation should “faithfully represent” a space or a work. That’s a 19th-century paradigm, rooted in photography as evidence. What we’re working with is documentation as an unstable narrative device.

Examples?

We’ve used generative prompts with artists on real documentary images, transforming actual installations into “architectural speculations” or “failed prototypes”, in order to expose the tension between what’s visible and what’s possible.

We’ve applied arbitrary visual edits, cropping, zooming, focal shifts, imposed by AI trained on non-art datasets, introducing new aesthetic logics.

In some cases, the documentation sequence we create with artists is structured as a nonlinear timeline, where the images of an exhibition are presented as if the show itself were in progress, always being installed, never finished.

We also deploy intentional visual contradictions: impossible lighting, subtly illogical perspectives, skewed compositing.
So is it documentation, or is it a visual performance about documentation?

The kind of narrative we build is what we call meta-documentation: it speaks about the artwork, yes, but also about the way artworks exist through their transmission. It’s as if we’re saying:
“This is how it was, maybe. This is how it could be. This is how you see it now. This is how you’ll see it tomorrow.”
In that sense, we’re not documenting an exhibition. We’re exploring how documentation becomes a means to articulate the structural instability of artistic experience in the digital age, never separate from the work, but as a layer of its unfolding.

Your approach to documentation reflects a post-photographic, expanded notion of the image, where the document ceases to be neutral and becomes performative.
How do you respond to the critique that this approach risks dissolving the ‘truth’ of the original artwork?

The short answer is: we welcome that risk.

The “truth” of the original artwork is a romantic construct, often designed to support a museological, proprietary idea of art.
The work doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in how it’s exhibited, narrated, photographed, manipulated, seen. And every document, even the most “neutral” one, is already an interpretation.
The illusion of “transparent” documentation is just a refined form of visual self-censorship.

We don’t dissolve the truth of the work, we expose how its truth is conditioned by the ways it is seen, narrated, and transmitted. Documentation doesn’t replace the work, it reveals its potential extensions.

And frankly, if a work can’t survive being challenged by its own image, it’s fragile.
If performative documentation throws it off balance, that’s where art truly begins to live, not to die.

Rather than fearing dissolution, we should be asking: Why do we need to believe in fixed originality? What are we trying to protect?
We’re not here to protect.
We’re here to open.
And if something disintegrates in the process, maybe it was already unstable to begin with.

In your preparatory texts, you reference “suspended” spaces, between reality and fiction, such as exhibitions without audiences, underground venues, and moving rooms. How important is the exhibition context in shaping documentation? And how does AI intervene in those contexts?

For us, the exhibition context isn’t a neutral backdrop, it’s the script. It shapes what is seen, how, and under what conditions. Documenting a work outside of that context is like quoting a single line from a conversation: it loses meaning and rhythm.

Although we often work with destabilized or ambiguous environments, our projects are firmly grounded in physical reality. Independent spaces such as Sunset, and others, have chosen to collaborate with us because they see documentation not as an add-on, but as a curatorial method. They don’t just host shows, they support a structural way of thinking, offering their venues as active frameworks for exploring the temporal and material logic of visibility.

We use empty venues, audience-less exhibitions, or mobile rooms not for effect, but as both visual metaphors and functional tools. Ambiguity, for us, reveals more than it hides. AI operates within these contexts as an agent of instability: shifting perspectives, blending environments, collapsing spatial hierarchies. It makes visible what’s absent, or questions what appears stable.

In this way, context becomes choreography, and documentation turns into a spatial performance. We’re not reproducing what a show “was”, we’re staging what it could be.

There seems to be a strong affinity in your work with underground and DIY aesthetics, where documentation is not just archival but political and countercultural. Do you see yourselves as part of that lineage? What cultural influences have shaped your approach?

Yes, absolutely. But not out of nostalgia or aesthetic preference. The underground isn’t a style, it’s a stance. A form of resistance. A rejection of rules not because they’re flawed, but because they’ve become invisible.

DIY appeals to us because it’s where documentation becomes autonomous. Where the image isn’t promotion, but protest. Where each visual gesture carries an implicit declaration: “I don’t need your permission to show, archive, or narrate.”

Our influences are less about specific names and more about postures: the energy of illegal raves, bootleg cassettes, badly printed zines. But also the conceptual sharpness of Louise Lawler, the strategic erasures of Michael Asher, the tilted framing of Wolfgang Tillmans, the archaeological fictions of Nicolas Lamas. And beyond that: the jittery edits of ’90s music videos, the glitch aesthetics of early Tumblr, surveillance footage from student occupations.

We’re interested in anything that punctures the institutional visual apparatus, not to replicate it, but to carry it forward.

In your upcoming installation “Dressed for Space,” you’re exploring the idea of a fluid exhibition space, where walls and artworks move, guided by AI. How does this shift change the criteria for installation and experience in a space that is constantly being “rewritten” in real time?

It changes everything, irreversibly. Curation is no longer about arranging static objects in stable configurations. It’s about activating variability. The space is no longer a neutral container, it becomes a kinetic engine.

Walls become mobile interfaces. Objects lose their fixity and acquire a new kind of vulnerability: they can be reshaped, relocated, rewritten. This is a performative space, it doesn’t represent, it acts.

For the viewer, this means abandoning the fantasy of total visibility. There’s no longer a “perfect viewpoint.” There’s only the experience that unfolds in the moment, in the place you happen to occupy.

It’s closer to club culture than a museum visit, unstable, immersive, transient. A moving exhibition resists the static photograph. It sabotages the archive. You don’t stop it. You don’t capture it. You pass through it.

In your projects, the documentary image is often modified, hybridized, or generated from scratch. How do you distinguish (if you do) between a document-image and an artwork-image?
The honest answer is: we no longer do. For us, the document-image and the artwork-image aren’t opposing categories, they’re two sides of the same ambiguity. An image can begin as documentation and end up as an artwork, or the other way around. That slippage is exactly what interests us.

The image becomes a hybrid territory, where its function shifts depending on context, manipulation, and curatorial intent. If an AI alters the lighting in an installation shot, is it “better documentation,” or is it a new visual object? If a generated image simulates an exhibition that never existed, is it archive or fiction? We’d say: it’s both. And that’s the point.

After all, who decided documentation had to be subordinate? What if the so-called “supporting image” holds the most explosive potential? We treat every image as an active device, a potentially authorial gesture. That’s why we’ve stopped dividing them.

Artists like Nicolas Lamas, Manor Grunewald, Francesco De Prezzo, or Marius Lut seem to align closely with your vision, as they already work on the edge between installation, sculpture (or painting), and documentation. How do you select artists to work with, and what kind of dialogue do you develop with their practices?

Selection is never based on “quality” in the academic sense, nor on CVs. What we’re looking for is epistemic compatibility. We look for artists who are already challenging the boundary between artwork and context, between vision and document, those who are unafraid to lose control or question the authority of authorship itself.

With artists like Marius Lut, or Lamas, the dialogue is not illustrative, it’s structural. We don’t ask, “Can we document your work?” but rather, “Do you want to enter this grey zone, where your work will be filtered, manipulated, rewritten?” Those who say yes, do so knowingly. And that’s where true collaboration begins, not “capturing” a piece, but co-creating an unstable narrative around what the work has become through its documentation.

In short: we choose those already out of alignment. Those who aren’t looking for a frame, but for a crack.

Looking ahead, your project seems to be redefining both the exhibition and the catalog format. Are you planning a publication, an online platform, or new collaborations to further expand this idea of documentation as curatorial language?

Yes, and it will be everything except a catalog.

We’re developing an expanded platform: a digital and physical environment where documentation is not archived but continually re-engineered. We’re not publishing a book, we’re releasing a machine. A system that generates new versions of the same exhibitions, the same images, on loop.

Yes, there will be a printed component, but conceived as a flawed manual: glitched versions, generated descriptions, fake images, annotated prompts, intentional errors. Every copy will be different. Every page will reflect on the possibility, or impossibility, of fixing something in place.

In parallel, the online platform will serve as our experimental field: open APIs, unstable documentation, image flows modifiable by users. Not an archive, but a living organism.

We want to become an open-source curatorial device.
For us, to document means to redefine what a visual experience can be. And this project is just the beginning.