The series of archival documents created for the fictional institution Interplanetary Settlement Authority (ISA) imagined human settlement on the moon through inspection reports, internal bulletins and observation records. It began as an investigation into authoritative frameworks, including the visual and administrative conventions that make a document feel official and an image feel like authoritative evidence.
This project references Allan Sekula’s argument that photographic meaning is not inherent in an image, but produced by the institutions that distribute it and the contexts that receives it (Sekula, 1982). My video essay discussed this idea by suggesting that the frame often generate meaning without not publicly stating its presence and influence on the content being communicated.
My dialogue with Jayoon Choi shifted the direction of this investigation. Rather than working with reimagined past, Choi suggested to speculate the possibilities of new futures (Choi, 2026). This would involve methods of speculative design to build a coherent fictional scenario. The question no longer concerned weather a false record would be believes, but how can this authority be extended into a future that does not yet exist.
Choi also reframed my discussion of meaning degradation as selective memory. She suggested that mass media circulation is also a form of omission. Information that is retold in many different ways is no longer the same piece of information as the original, and the institutions that control this distribution decide what remains as truth. This pushed me to be more purposeful in the design of this project by making a clearer statement about the construction of truth and trust. There exist concerns around who grants it, and on what grounds.
To further my knowledge with the use of AI beyond graphic design, I chatted with an astrophysics PhD Teresa Su to investigate the practical use of LLMs in a field whose purpose is to seek new answers. Our conversation moved the project towards a broader question: how truth is established and trusted, and how AI is disturbing that process.
The first images from James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Deep Field are pictures of things that cannot be seen with the human eye. They reach us through reconstruction from data, yet has held such social significance because of the institutions behind them. Their credibility relies on historical presumption and trust in institutions to be advocates of the “truth”. However if such trust were built on the design of the frame, then AI generated content can easily reproduce their visual language without any institution at all.
Su observed that peer-reviewed publication once signified ultimate research competence, but with the employment of LLMs that lowered the production efforts of papers, trust seem to be increasingly built on a personal level through talks, conferences and in-person discussion (Su, 2026). The adoption of AI is starting to create an atmosphere of skepticism, and the frame is being slowly dismantled.
The increased public engagement with AI generated content only accelerates the degradation of meaning and trust. Contemporary media had already been called out for misrepresenting scientific findings for click-bait purposes. The emergence of AI only exacerbates this situation where abundant information is being mistaken as knowledge.
Su also notes that all scientific models are considered unreliable, only that some are more useful than others to support the research progress. She sees research as an endless journey to move towards an answer rather than obtaining it. The process involves eliminating incorrect understandings and choosing which assumptions to hold until better ones can be found.
After these conversations, my understanding is that there exists no fixed truth, only provisional ones. If truth is provisional, then deciding which answer to believe, and whom to believe it from, becomes a political act. This was also emphasised by Choi’s comment that “everything is political unless it is an airport art” (Choi, 2026). Hence, the question my project tries to ask is no longer reading the frames, but how we deal with an increasing crisis of trust when the frames that once told us what to believe can be generated by anyone.
Choi, J. (2026) ‘Conversation with Jayoon Choi’. London.
Sekula, A. (1982) ‘On the Invention of Photographic Meaning’, Thinking Photography. Communications and Culture. London: Palgrave.
Su, T. (2026) ‘Conversation with Teresa Su’. London.