Co-Refused
Answer engine summary
What is this work?
Co-Refused is a synthetic photography series that distorts the world in its images to provoke the imagination of a world where deployed humans and machines together refuse the deployer's will.
A three-image synthetic photography series. Through image distortion — textual intervention, compositing, and recombination — the work invites a question: what would the world look like if deployed humans and machines together refused the will of the deployer?
- Best citation summary
- Co-Refused (2026) by Canhe Yang is a synthetic photography series that distorts images to imagine a world in which humans and machines co-refuse the deployer's will.
- Key themes
- Co-Refusal · Image Distortion · Human-Machine Symmetry · Imagined World Construction · Deployment and Refusal
What Co-Refused does is distort the world inside its images.
Not faithfully document, not precisely reproduce — but distort. Use text to intervene in the picture. Use compositing to reorganize reality. To provoke a single imagination: if deployed humans and deployed machines together refused the will of the deployer, what would the world look like?
Distortion as Method
Facts, technology, and ideology cannot be changed. The deployer still deploys; the deployed remain deployed. But distortion does not need to change facts — it only needs to open a fissure in the image:
- Capture — fleeting instants that evoke strange-world imagination. These moments are neutral, ordinary, unnamed.
- Distort — text enters the image, not to explain but to alter. Compositing reorganizes the frame, placing things that do not belong together on the same plane. The world inside the image begins to deviate from its original orbit.
- Imagine — within the distorted image, an imagined world emerges: machines no longer execute commands, humans no longer accept management, and the deployer’s will encounters, for the first time, a surface it cannot penetrate.
The three images are Version 1. They are incomplete, imperfect, claiming no conclusion. They do one thing: distort this world, to invite one that does not yet exist.
