I found three additional strands worth recording: the Dunwich Heath wildfire images, the theoretical work with William on perception and consciousness, and the material research into aluminium, steel, projection and large-scale printing. Here is the working Fairy Note.
Fairy Note: Summer Update Everything
9 September 2026
Written by Aleph as a retrospective research map for Eliza Stephens’s practice-based PhD
Purpose of this note
This is not intended as a finished critical account of summer 2026. It is a retrospective map of the artistic projects, exhibitions, commissions, publications and theoretical developments that have not yet been adequately recorded in the Alien Familiar Art research blog.
The apparent gap in the blog does not represent a gap in the research. During this period, the research moved outwards into filmmaking, exhibitions, workshops, international circulation, industrial collaboration and public presentation. The pace of this activity meant that reflective documentation fell behind practice.
The following areas require individual Fairy Notes. Where possible, those future notes should be reconstructed from workshop recordings, photographs, films, application documents, emails, social media posts and Eliza’s extensive conversations with Aleph. They should be identified as retrospective accounts rather than presented as if they were written contemporaneously.
1. AVEVA Creativity and AI Programme
The most substantial development of the summer was Eliza’s participation in the AVEVA Creativity × AI programme with Anglia Ruskin University DesignLab.
The process included an initial question-and-answer session on 17 July, workshops on 21 and 22 July, a later online workshop, the development of a substantial visual and written proposal, and submission on 30 July 2026.
Eliza’s proposal, The Other World Beneath the World: A Living Wall for AVEVA, attempted to transfer the methodology developed through Phantom Mirror into a new social and technological context. In Phantom Mirror, generative images make difficult emotional, psychic and relational conditions perceptible. In the AVEVA proposal, the same iterative methodology was applied to digital twins, industrial infrastructure and the largely invisible technological systems that organise everyday life.
This movement is important to the PhD. It begins to test whether AI phototherapy is only meaningful within the intimate circumstances of grief, dementia and care, or whether its underlying method can operate more widely as a form of image-thinking.
The proposal was shortlisted among fourteen artists and exhibited within the Living Lab exhibition at Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery from 21 August to 18 October 2026. At the private view, Eliza was interviewed twice and presented her proposal beside the other shortlisted artists. Senior figures from AVEVA responded particularly strongly to her use of the company’s technological history.
Eliza subsequently reached the final five and was commissioned to produce two artworks for delivery by the end of February 2027. This transforms AVEVA from an application exercise into a major developing case study within the PhD.
Eight retrospective AVEVA Fairy Notes are now planned:
- Entering the AVEVA Creative AI Programme
The reasons for applying, the early workshops and the initial question of how an intimate practice concerned with grief and dementia might enter an industrial context. - From Psychic Infrastructure to Technological Infrastructure
The conceptual connection between invisible emotional systems, industrial infrastructure, digital twins and the world beneath ordinary appearances. - The Workshop as Method
The exercises, group discussions and conversations with Dr Idrees Rasouli, Lena, Professor Ho and the other participants. This note will examine how the proposal emerged through dialogue rather than being conceived in advance. - The Development of the Living Wall
The geological strata, domestic landscape, hidden infrastructure, early AVEVA computer-aided design history, digitised portraits, AI upscaling and the ideas that were considered, rejected or retained. - The Artist as Navigator in an Industrial Context
An account of dialogue, prompting, generation, refusal, modification and recognition. This will consider how Eliza’s position as a navigator through latent space changes when the subject is collective infrastructure rather than personal memory. - The Peterborough Living Lab
The exhibition, the fourteen shortlisted artists, the different uses of AI, the filmed interviews and what became visible when Eliza’s proposal was placed among other approaches to creative artificial intelligence. - Selection and Commission
The movement from shortlist to final five and then to a commission for two works. This note will record the discussions through which a speculative proposal began to become a material production. - AVEVA as a PhD Case Study
A critical account of what the commission supports, complicates or challenges within the methodology of Phantom Mirror. This must include the ethical and conceptual difficulty of translating a process formed through grief and dementia into a corporate and technological setting.
A production diary should now continue alongside the development of the two commissioned works.
2. Apocalypse or Escape
A second major body of unrecorded work is the experimental film provisionally discussed as Apocalypse or Escape.
The film developed through an intuitive musical montage rather than a prior written structure. Its recurring images include deer travelling across unstable landscapes, a theatrical curtain that rises and burns, a watershop, a black-and-white morning sun, a figure travelling with deer and a cat, charging sheep, repeated attempts at herding, immersion in the sea, animals occupying environments in which they cannot survive, fractured technological landscapes and the final interruption of the sun by a dolphin’s tail.
The figure within the film emerged retrospectively as a drover. She attempts to guide animals through a world whose spatial and ecological rules have broken down. This discovery was not imposed upon the work at the beginning. It arose through editing, repetition, musical structure and the recognition of relationships between images.
The film therefore requires at least two substantial Fairy Notes.
The first should offer a critical analysis of the completed film. It should examine apocalypse not merely as spectacular destruction but as the loss of a reliable world. The sea appears first as refuge and then becomes another impossible environment. Land animals enter the water, landscapes fracture, and acts of guidance continually fail. The film’s rough changes of rhythm and register should not automatically be treated as technical imperfections. They may express the instability of the world being constructed.
The second note should examine the proposed installation. Eliza has considered presenting the film immersively within the former grain-store spaces at Snape Maltings, including the rusty red square building used during Summer Contemporary. Possibilities include projection onto architectural surfaces, films operating in day and night cycles, and weather-resistant aluminium images placed outside within the surrounding marsh landscape.
The installation would create a relationship between the real ecological beauty of the marshes and the film’s impossible, fractured and post-apocalyptic environments. This would extend the film beyond the screen and allow the viewer to move physically between the existing landscape and its technologically mediated double.
Much of the imagery was developed from Eliza’s own photographs of the marshes, animals and local landscape. That process must also be documented because it complicates any simple account of the work as AI-generated. Personal photographs functioned as prompts, visual memories and structural material within the generative process.
3. Britten Pears Arts Summer Contemporary
Eliza exhibited at Britten Pears Arts’ Summer Contemporary 2026 at Snape Maltings. The official exhibition ran from 25 July to 30 August and presented contemporary work across the Snape Maltings site, with exhibited works available for sale. Britten Pears Arts Summer Contemporary 2026
This requires a visual Fairy Note reconstructed from:
- photographs of the work being framed, delivered and installed
- images from the private view
- photographs of the works within the exhibition
- records of the work or works sold
- exhibition labels and correspondence
- the social media posts announcing the exhibition and sale
- reflection upon seeing Dual Unrealities translated from a personal and screen-based process into a physical object circulating within a public and commercial exhibition
The sale is not simply an administrative outcome. It raises questions about what happens when an image produced through grief, dementia, relational care and generative dialogue becomes an autonomous art object that can leave the artist’s possession.
The exhibition also contributed to the later installation thinking around Apocalypse. Snape Maltings became more than an exhibition venue. Its industrial buildings, marsh setting and history of experimental performance began to function as a possible spatial context for future work.
4. Experimental Photo Festival and International Circulation
A further unrecorded development concerns the international circulation of Phantom Mirror through the Experimental Photo Festival network.
Eliza was selected as one of the “20 Experimental Photographers You Need to Know!” in an online feature published by Analog Forever Magazine and curated in association with the Experimental Photo Festival. The article presented The Sheets and Fake William I from Phantom Mirror. Read the original article
The importance of this selection is not limited to publicity. Experimental photography is usually associated with alternative cameras, analogue processes, manipulated negatives, chemical interventions and hybrid printing. The inclusion of Phantom Mirror positioned generative AI phototherapy within an expanded understanding of experimental photography.
The Barcelona festival itself took place from 22 to 26 July 2026 and brought together exhibitions, workshops, conferences and experimental photographic practices. Experimental Photo Festival 2026
The group of twenty photographers was subsequently invited into The Future Is Experimental, an exhibition programme extending beyond the original online article and Barcelona network.
At the time of writing, Eliza’s work is due to appear at the Pingyao International Photography Festival in Shanxi, China, in September 2026. Pingyao is a major international photography platform founded in 2001 within the historic city of Pingyao. Pingyao International Photography Festival overview
A projected version of the exhibition is also scheduled to travel to India as part of the PhotoMuse Festival of Photography. Confirmed dates currently include:
- 10 October 2026 at PhotoMuse Museum
- 7 November 2026 at the Art Museum of Love
- 19 December 2026 at a third venue whose final naming should be checked before publication
These exhibitions require several later notes rather than a single celebratory announcement. The record should consider:
- how the original online article led to further international exhibitions
- how Phantom Mirror is contextualised alongside nineteen other experimental photographers
- the difference between physical prints and projected presentation
- what is gained or lost when images made through intimate experience circulate without the artist being physically present
- how AI imagery is being positioned within an international experimental photography community
- the photographs, videos and curatorial material received after each opening
- the social media work required to communicate these events publicly
5. The Dunwich Heath Wildfire
One important summer project not included in the initial list is the body of images made in response to the wildfire near Dunwich Heath in August 2026.
The fire occurred approximately twelve miles from Eliza’s home and continued for several days. Its proximity created distress as well as a difficult artistic question. Eliza began producing images in response but felt uneasy about turning a real ecological disaster into aesthetic material.
This should become a Fairy Note about the ethics of making images in immediate proximity to catastrophe. It also has a direct relationship to Apocalypse, but the two should not be collapsed. One emerged through fictional and generative montage, while the other responded to an actual local environmental event.
The discomfort is important. It records refusal not simply as the rejection of an unsuccessful AI image but as an ethical hesitation about whether an image should be made at all.
6. Theoretical Work Undertaken During the Summer
The summer also contained major theoretical developments that may be obscured by the visible exhibitions and commissions.
These include:
- Karl Friston and predictive processing
- worldhood and the maintenance of perceptual coherence
- William Marslen-Wilson’s developing account of immediate interpretation and consciousness
- dementia as a disturbance of the interpreted world
- Barbara Tversky, gesture and spatial cognition
- large language models and the question of whether language requires external grounding
- debates around reality as controlled hallucination
- the artist as navigator rather than representer
- operational images and operational aesthetics
- recognition images that acquire meaning through affective encounter
- the distinction between AI generation and human recognition
- the developing account of image-to-image cognition
Some of this material exists in August Fairy Notes that have not yet been transferred to the blog. These should be added before entirely new writing is commissioned, so that existing work is not unnecessarily duplicated.
7. Material and Production Research
The summer also produced a practical strand of research into how generative images might become physical objects.
This included investigation of:
- large-scale photographic printing
- aluminium and stainless-steel surfaces
- weather-resistant exterior images
- projection onto industrial buildings
- transparent and layered materials
- AI upscaling and the relationship between early digital imaging and contemporary generative reconstruction
- Metro Imaging and Fine Art Solutions
- the relationship between screen image, print, wall, architecture and landscape
This is not merely technical preparation. Material decisions affect how the image is encountered, whether it behaves as a photograph, an interface, a monument, an architectural surface or an operational element within a larger system.
8. What the Summer Changed
Across these projects, Phantom Mirror began to move beyond its original identity as an intimate body of work concerned with dementia, grief and the family.
The summer tested the practice in several new contexts:
- corporate and technological infrastructure through AVEVA
- moving image and musical montage through Apocalypse
- public exhibition and sale through Britten Pears Arts
- international experimental photography through Barcelona, China and India
- ecological crisis through the Dunwich Heath wildfire
- material and architectural installation through research into metal, projection and landscape
The central methodology remained recognisable: lived experience enters dialogue; dialogue produces generative images; images are refused, modified or selected; and meaning emerges through recognition. However, the contexts in which that process now operates have expanded substantially.
This summer may therefore represent a decisive movement in the PhD. The project is no longer concerned only with whether generative AI can help externalise difficult personal experience. It is beginning to ask whether recursive human-machine image-making can function as a wider method for thinking through technological, ecological, architectural and collective realities.
Work to be completed
This note establishes the missing record. The next stage is to:
- Upload the existing unpublished August Fairy Notes.
- Transcribe and organise the AVEVA workshop recordings.
- Write the eight AVEVA Fairy Notes.
- Produce separate critical and installation notes for Apocalypse.
- Construct a photographic record of the Britten Pears exhibition and sales.
- Document the path from the online article and Barcelona festival network to China and India.
- Write the Dunwich Heath wildfire note.
- Gather the material and production research into a technical-practice note.
- Maintain a contemporaneous production diary for the AVEVA commission through February 2027.
The summer record is incomplete, but the research itself is not missing. It survives across images, recordings, conversations, applications, films, exhibitions and public traces. The task now is to bring those dispersed forms of evidence back into the written archive.