Boris Eldagsen is a German artist trained as a photographer who works across conceptual art, image theory and AI-generated imagery,using it to question how images are read, valued and believed.In April 2023 he won the creative category of the Sony World Photography Award with an AI-generated image, then refused the prize on the grounds that it was not a real photograph.
The image, The Electrician from his series Pseudomnesia, is a black-and-white, vintage-styled portrait generated with OpenAI's DALL-E 2,which Eldagsen submitted partly to test whether institutions could recognize an AI-generated picture.The series grew out of old photographs he found that had belonged to his father, a German soldier in the Second World War.Eldagsen calls his AI-generated work “promptography”, a term he uses to mark a dividing line from photography and to draw attention to the politics of the corporate image generators behind it.
In 2023 he and Tanvir Taolad made TRAUMAPORN Reloaded, a mixed-media work combining photography, promptography, wallpaper and flags, shown at the Neue Galerie im Höhmannhaus in Augsburg, that examines how fascism is assimilated “not as ideology, but as design language”.In 2025 he curated “PSYCHOPOMP! Follow the Unconscious”, a group exhibition using AI as a medium of introspection rather than image generation, which inaugurated the Roger Ballen Centre for Photographic Arts in Johannesburg.Since 2022 he has taught AI to creatives and lectured, exhibited and spoken at institutions internationally.
Since May 2025 he has developed AI Art Rants, examining the differences between human-made and AI-generated art and identifying mortality as the central distinction between the two. His collection I Like Emotions and Emotions Like Me: How to Explain AI to a Coyote reworks the setting of Joseph Beuys's performance I Like America and America Likes Me without reenacting it, using AI to explore what changes once emotion becomes reproducible. The collection was released on objkt.com in January 2026.
