THE FUTURE WITHOUT YOU

Graphic design: Ying Lei
Texts generated by ChatGPT-3 and ChatGPT-3.5, MiniGPT-4, and img2poem
None of the images in this book were created using artificial intelligence

Printed by L.capitan (Graphius), Ghent, Belgium
First edition of 800 copies
Published by Beijing Silvermine & Lyre Press, November 2023

For this collaboration, Max Pinckers and Thomas Sauvin explored 50,000 transparencies rescued from a recycling center in Beijing. This analog archive from the 1990s consists of stock photographs produced in the United States that ended up in China when a company subsidiary was opened to market them in a new territory.

The images in this archive cover a wide range of subjects, themes, and photographic styles. They were created with the sole intention of being purchased or licensed for nonspecific contexts, representing an era of advertising when high-quality generic visuals were used by companies to avoid the cost and effort of producing custom photo shoots.

With stock photography embodying one of the most commercialized forms of imagery, Pinckers and Sauvin focused their selection on the world of corporate business, portrayed through actors of limited talent during a period of anxiety marked by the arrival of the personal computer and the rise of the Internet.

Reconsidered 30 years later, these images reveal something both amusing and unsettling—almost prophetic—having lost none of their relevance in the age of artificial intelligence.