“To Dream a Night, Gently, Through a Glass, Darkly”
ÉCAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne (Switzerland) Master
Thomas Martin
Image from “To Dream a Night, Gently, Through a Glass, Darkly” project by Thomas Martin
Biography
Website: https://www.thomas--martin.co.uk/
Instagram: @tho.martin
Thomas Martin is a photographic artist based between Lausanne and London. His practice spans photography, CGI, installation, and moving image, exploring contemporary visual culture and the affective impact of synthetic imagery. He is particularly interested in how digital systems shape perception, attention, and emotional experience. His recent projects examine themes of synthetic care, digital labour, and conspiratorial thinking.
The project
To Dream a Night, Gently, Through a Glass, Darkly explores the fear of losing sight, rooted in a personal risk and utilising it as a metaphor for a broader loss of clarity, belief, and imagination. Where ignorance offers a bleak form of bliss, and the very act of looking to the future is questioned. Through generative AI images and the appropriation of mass-media AI misinformation imagery, the project stages an unstable world where looking no longer guarantees understanding. It considers how neural media, political anxiety and apocalyptic narratives shape what we see, believe and imagine. It asks how much of what we see is chosen, how much is imposed, and how much is endured simply because it has become too exhausting to imagine otherwise. The work asks whether blindness can become a form of protection, and what it means to keep looking when the future itself appears in collapse, obscured and hallucinatory.
Image from “To Dream a Night, Gently, Through a Glass, Darkly” project by Thomas Martin
Image from “To Dream a Night, Gently, Through a Glass, Darkly” project by Thomas Martin