After the Flood
The Chronovisor, biblical Polaroids, and the desire to see the past
I’ve been wondering lately if AI imagery is a devotional way of seeing that connects us to how our medieval, pre-optic ancestors related to images. Where paintings dominated the visual language of that age, photography dominates ours.
That thought has pulled me toward two kinds of impossible witness: the Chronovisor, and my latest work with biblical Polaroids. Though different in tone and texture, each converges on our tendency to believe in images, especially photographic ones.
The Chronovisor was a device reputedly invented in the 1960s by Benedictine monk Pellegrino Ernetti. It claimed to be capable of viewing past events by detecting residual electromagnetic radiation, tuning into history as if it were a perpetual broadcast waiting to be seen. Accounts of it describe antennas and a “direction finder” used to lock onto past “frequencies,” producing image and sound on a screen, like a time-travelling television set. The reported subjects the Chronovisor could see included monumental religious and cultural events such as the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and rituals in ancient Rome.
There is doubt whether the Chronovisor ever existed but its promise closely aligns to a desire shared by so many; the fantasy of watching the past play out again, as if the world has always been recorded and can simply be rewound.
That promise is so familiar to us because it underpins much of photographic authority: the belief that a camera can witness history objectively without motive or bias. With its dials, signals, and antennas, the Chronovisor borrows the rhetoric of instrumentation so that faith can be outsourced to a machine. After all, if the machine recorded it, it must have happened.
A new series I’ve been working on reflects on biblical events captured by Polaroid film. As generative AI becomes increasingly fluent in the visual languages of photography, archaeology, and anthropology, it reignites an awkward question: is it possible to produce images of events that occurred long before cameras existed?
These images trade on photography’s long-standing claim to neutrality, yet their material form keeps their impossibility intact. They are, after all, photographs of events that predate photography by millennia. And still, they trigger the same reflex because the Polaroid isn’t a virtuoso medium, it is one of the bluntest and most banal carriers of photographic credibility. Polaroids read as accidental, proximate, casually evidentiary. That’s why they register as proof, at least for a few seconds before you realise what you’re seeing.
There’s something revealing about that lag. Even when we know better, photography’s visual grammar still asserts itself. That reflex interests me more than the theological content. The Polaroids aren’t attempting to prove scripture; they expose the circuitry of belief embedded in images, especially those that look like records.
This is where the Chronovisor and the Polaroids share similarities. They each promise access to something fundamentally inaccessible and construct a kind of visual relic: an object that stands in for an event we can’t witness. But their differences matter, because they reveal two different routes by which images gain authority.
The Chronovisor is authoritarian in posture. It says “the truth exists, it has been captured, and I can show it to you.” It implies a single correct view of history. It wants to replace interpretation with revelation. In that sense it feels less like art and more like an instrument of certainty.
The biblical Polaroids, on the other hand, don’t hide their anachronism. Their authority is more slippery. They behave like evidence while disqualifying themselves as evidence. They sit closer to icons than documents. They’re designed to make the viewer feel the tension between photographic trust and historical absurdity.
That tension is what I think of, broadly, as Seeing Things. Not seeing as a neutral act, but seeing as a negotiation between perception, memory, and desire. We don’t just look at images, we bring cultural baggage to them; the history of art and painting, the camera’s claims to truth, the institutional weight of the archive. And we bring longing: for certainty, proximity, and for a past that can be grasped and understood.
Returning to my opening thought about AI, if photography once displaced the icon by offering “evidence,” then synthetic imagery has a way of drifting back toward the icon’s older logic: an image that persuades without needing to have witnessed anything at all.