A World Without Us Revisited

Alex May contributed a new body of Algorithmic Photography images to A World Without Us Revisited, the 2020 online project by IMPAKT that returned to the ideas of its 2018 exhibition A World Without Us. Developed during lockdown, May’s images reimagined the relation between nature, technology, and absence through a digitally constructed gas holder populated by swarming algorithmic bird-like forms.

The new work emerged from a specific historical moment. While much of everyday life had paused, traces of industrial activity seemed to recede and attention shifted towards the ways non-human life might reoccupy spaces usually structured around human movement. Rather than documenting that condition directly, May used the language of Algorithmic Photography inside a simulated environment, applying the same long-developed process to a synthetic scene. The result is an image of post-human atmosphere that is also self-consciously artificial: an algorithmic study of an algorithm.

That tension matters within the wider practice. May’s work often asks how technology changes what we can perceive, remember, or imagine as real. Here, those questions are sharpened by pandemic experience and ecological unease. The work does not present a simple return of nature after humans. Instead, it stages a world where simulation, memory, and environmental speculation are already inseparable.