■ VICE, Spring 2026

electric dreama x Vice

Not the Photo Issue
Spring 2026

For VICE’s Spring 2026 special, The Not The Photo Issue, electric dreama was invited to step into photography at a moment when images are losing credibility. With generative AI, propaganda, and hyper-mediated realities blurring truth and fabrication, the brief was not to create new images but to destabilise existing ones.

Working with commissioned photography, electric dreama developed a series of uncanny, post-photographic works that sit in the tension between recognition and distortion. Familiar visual languages are pushed just far enough to feel off. Faces almost resolve. Bodies almost belong. Moments feel like they almost happened. The work avoids spectacle and focuses on psychological friction, shifting the question from what an image shows to what it does to the viewer.

The challenge was to operate within VICE’s editorial world, known for its documentary authority, while quietly undermining the reliability of the photographic image itself. The result is a body of work that does not illustrate the theme but enacts it. These images expose how unstable seeing has become in 2026.

Rather than offering clarity, electric dreama leans into ambiguity as a tool. The work is culturally sharp, visually controlled, and just unsettling enough to stay with you.