The Fifth-Dimensional Image: Post-Indexical Photography and the Space of Possibility (Abstract)
This article argues that contemporary AI-generated imagery does not signal the end of photography, but rather its expansion into a new ontological regime. Moving beyond indexical trace, post-indexical/post-optical image production operates within probabilistic latent spaces structured by computation rather than physical referents. Drawing from photographic theory, semiotics, continental philosophy, and contemporary media studies, the article introduces, and defines, the concept of the fifth-dimensional image space as a critical framework for understanding this transformation. If traditional photography operates within four-dimensional spacetime as an inscription of light across time, AI-generated imagery emerges from a field of potentiality in which images are rendered through navigation of latent relations rather than a registration of reality. Engaging Charles Sanders Peirce, André Bazin, Roland Barthes, Gaston Bachelard, and Joanna Zylinska, the article situates this shift within broader transformations in machine vision, and nonhuman image culture. Through analytical consideration of the project, Guåhan, it argues that post-indexical/post-optical practice extends photography beyond evidentiary capture into a domain of speculative construction. The fifth-dimensional photographic image opens new aesthetic and perceptual possibilities, and is no longer defined exclusively by what has been, but increasingly by what can be imagined.