Agnes Pori, a fictional island nation located in Southeast Asia, is depicted through almost 300 highly detailed black-and-white images in this postcard-size book. With all contents printed in reverse on translucent and thin wax paper, readers are invited on a disorienting journey through the city, viewing ghostly impressions of these images rather than the contents themselves. Despite its fictitious nature, a real city’s name resides within the reshuffled letters of Agnes Pori (a name fashioned after Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities) and a genuine question about the nature of images and development behind the publication of this book.

The Emergent City explores the eerie familiarity of AI-generated images. These black and white scenes resemble real urban spaces yet feel subtly wrong — echoes of places that could exist but don’t. Through machine learning, Isidro Rodriguez crafted hyperreal “non-places” that unsettle our sense of space and memory. This body of work examines how AI reflects human imagination, biases, and our deep reliance on patterns. Blurring the line between real and virtual, it taps into Marc Augé’s notion of hyperreality. The images complicate photography’s relationship to truth, inviting viewers into an uncanny world where the familiar becomes strange and the artificial feels disturbingly human.