It’s hardly an overstatement to say that the ability to use machines to mediate images means a major disruption to photography.

In a recent New York Times opinion piece, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari wrote, “A.I. [artificial intelligence] could rapidly eat the whole of human culture — everything we have produced over thousands of years — digest it and begin to gush out a flood of new cultural artifacts.”

“Machine Vision” at Candela Gallery is a sobering look at what that revised reality and its new cultural artifacts are shaping up to resemble. The survey of tech-based artists features photographers using robotics, artificial intelligence, and public surveillance cameras, as well as unconventional cameras such as scanners, computer monitors, X-rays and digital composites of appropriated, web-based images.

The exhibition eases the viewer into such technological artistry with Adam Chin’s “Photobooth Kiss” portraits, which at first glance appear as a contrast in sharpness. In each diptych, one side shows two people smiling inside a photobooth while next to it, is a blurred image suggesting the two are kissing, or dissolving. To create the latter, Chin employed a machine learning network, training it by using a database of vintage photobooth strips.

With a sample of 200 images, Chin taught the network what non-kissing and kissing images could look like. Feeding the network photos which didn’t have a kissing counterpart allowed the machine to use its new knowledge to fill in the blanks. Blurry and pixelated, some of the images nonetheless suggest an intimacy that may never have happened. “It’s an alternate photographic reality,” says Candela’s director Gordon Stettinius.

The same could be said for the work of Bangladeshi-American artist, Rashed Haq, a scientist and “technologist.” His series, “Human Trials,” seeks to create a visual embodiment of technology’s distorted view of human nature and its individuality. Haq utilizes long exposure times to move a light source across his subject, a process known as “light painting,” which creates portraits of unevenly layered light with some parts of the face completely obscured. Then these distorted images are fed into Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) artificial intelligence program to be further manipulated and warped. The final “portraits” can be disturbing for how far removed from humanity they seem, leaning more toward beast, insect, or at the very least, a malformed monster of some sort.

Haq recalls being a child and sitting on the balcony of his family’s Dhaka apartment, looking at family photographs. Through family albums, he understood what photographs represented. In school, he learned the technical language for photographs: two-dimensional registration of light on cellulose negative that are printed on silver halide paper. Twenty-five years later, he told Wired magazine that, as he sits in his studio today surrounded by thermal cameras, lidar, 3D printers, and AI software, he’s not so sure what photography is anymore.

And he’s not alone. With the dawn of broadly accessible A.I., both commercial and fine artists find themselves weighing the costs and benefits as well as developing ethics inherent to new technology. The exhibition “Machine Vision” and its accompanying panel discussion examine the complicated and unsettled issues of authorship, bias, privacy, data collection, and the precarious impermanence of reality.

Zurich artist Kurt Caviezel’s colorful photographs could almost be taken for postcards, except for the visual intrusion of something that doesn’t belong. Caviezel monitors tens of thousands of publicly accessible surveillance-cams located all over the world. When he sees a composition he likes, he takes a screenshot or downloads a single image that captures his eye. The result is that the tail feathers or claws of a bird interrupt the scenic beauty of a European harbor or mist-covered mountain, while some sort of insect is caught over a view of a verdant valley, or the Pyramids.

Perhaps the most straightforward photographs in the exhibition include Maija Tammi’s conceptual work, “One of Them is a Human.” Straight forward in that four photographs of four different people comprise the series with no machine manipulation used in photographing them. Yet, three are androids and while one is possibly human, there’s no guarantee. Another alternate photographic reality.

The artists’ panel will convene Rashed Haq, Michael Borowski, Adam Chin, and Noelle Mason for a panel discussion covering topics regarding the overlap in technology and photography, surveillance, artificial intelligence, and NFTs. Doors open at 6 p.m., with the panel discussions and live broadcast starting at 6:30 p.m. It is free, but reservations are required.

Stettinius views “Machine Age” as one way that Candela gallery is trying to join an important artistic conversation in the moment.

“Artists start with their own content, stir it up using a computer, and then edit and rearrange it,” he says. “This makes for questions of authorship and copyright because boundaries are evaporating. People become editors more than photographers. We don’t know where it’s going.”

“Machine Vision” runs through April 29 at Candela Gallery, 214 W. Broad St., visit candelagallery.com for more information. The “Machine Vision” artist panel takes place this Thursday, April 6 at 6:30 p.m., reservations at https://www.candelagallery.com/shop/p/machinevision-panel