Ctrl.Alt.Img was born out of research by photographer Çiğdem Yüksel. Çiğdem struggled to recognise herself in the photos often used by the Dutch media to represent Muslim women. These images seemed to share similar qualities, a veiled woman from behind, taken at a distance, often-times with a shopping bag in her hand. Muslim women at work, doing sports or pictured in the context of education are rarely featured. Çiğdem asked: If new machine learning tools are being trained on existing datasets with the same old stereotypes already featured in the media, then how can we future-proof AI images to be more inclusive?

Many of the current images seen every day on social media and in the news are being generated by algorithms and image-generation apps like Dall-E, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion. This development has an enormous influence on visual culture and our collective consciousness. But for underrepresented groups, this AI leap into the future can further deepen the digital and social divide. Ctrl.Alt.Img is a creative intervention that responds to this technological moment, using existing text-to-image tools to playfully explore more inclusive approaches to image making.

Credits
Ctrl.Alt.Img was born out of research by photographer Çiğdem Yüksel. It was designed, further researched and produced by affect lab in collaboration with documentary house Prospektor and creative technologists Babusi Nyoni and Mark Mooij. With special thanks to documentary participants: Thomas Roebers, Oumaima Hajri, Tanguy Lebreton, Zahra Ahmadi, Mohamed Bah, Melike Tarim and Ramsay Drover.