December 13 2024, 9:00AM

This was taken looking out the train window between Barcelona and Lyon, early in the morning. The sun was shining through from the opposite side of the train, creating reflections in the window I was looking through, thus the appearance of a double exposure. But this is a single shot, no layering or manipulation was involved.

So it is 2025 now. The new year came without much fanfare for us. We did get our twelve grapes, but ended up forgetting to eat them as we were in bed well before midnight. 2025 is proving to be quite the year already, with all the violence happening in the States in just a couple days. The most surreal thing was hearing about the Tesla blowing up in front of Trump tower: the fact it was intentional never even occurred to me, I just thought was it the battery that blew up? because it is a Tesla after all. Musk does not put a lot of emphasis on quality control.

Strange to think the photograph above is of the real world, of what I was seeing in that moment, although it looks so surreal, while artificially generated images are being taken as photographs of reality. The lines are getting so blurred, even I sometimes see a photograph in that typical internet style, totally saturated, technically “perfect”, an idealized landscape without a single distracting element, and have an internal debate whether it is an actual landscape that exists somewhere, or if it is AI-generated.

What is that saying, life is stranger than fiction or something like that? The photograph making the rounds of the fiery angular pile with the all-caps TRUMP on the building behind it is strangely enough real, as bizarre as it appears, while at the same time, I see more and more obviously AI-generated images in circulation on Substack and elsewhere that people are taking as photographs of the real world. Where is this leading us?