Weronika Gęsicka mines encyclopedias for their trap entries
Weronika Gęsicka’s Encyclopedia is a photographic project and artist book work that overturns the idea of authoritative knowledge. The visual artist presents a collection of several hundred fictitious entries taken from real encyclopedias, dictionaries and dictionaries, including Wikipedia, each illustrated through manipulated stock photos and Created by AI pictures. These so-called “trap entries” are deliberately false entries planted by editors to detect plagiarism. If another publication reprinted the content verbatim, the false entry would appear as proof.
What Gęsicka has done is to excavate them, give them form and turn them into a book that seems, at first glance, completely credible. At a time when the line between fact and fiction is becoming harder to trace, the question it poses seems less academic and more like survival skill.
For the artist, the work is also a larger reckoning with how we navigate information today. “Encyclopedia” is an attempt to consider how to function in today’s world, where we are bombarded daily with fake news and knowledge is neither stable nor certain. she says designboom. “It is also a question of what knowledge really is in an age where successive scientific studies are constantly bringing new information and what we knew before can quickly become outdated.”
Near dark. an unfinished American vampire horror film. directed by Ryan Zeller and written by Matt Craven and Kathryn Bigelow. It is a remake of the 1987 cult vampire-western horror film directed by Kathryn Biddelow | all images courtesy of Weronika Gęsicka and Jednostka Gallery
the mechanics of deliberate lying
Some of the entries Gęsicka found will immediately raise suspicions. Others are ones that could escape even a careful reader, covering fake animals, invented historical events, fictional characters and objects that never existed. Some posts contained only a single embedded error. others housed several dozen.
The resulting book, 252 pages and 862 images printed in an edition of 1,500, has the weight and visual grammar of something authoritative. That’s exactly the point. Like the Polish artist puts it “How can we distinguish false information from true information when we are inundated with AI-generated images and it is increasingly difficult to distinguish them from real photos?” she he asks. “We live in times where we have to verify the reality around us at every step.” It is this range between the absurd and the plausible that gives the play its unease, for the propositions that are hardest to challenge are also the most dangerous. The controversy surrounding the intentional planting of false information into fact-checking sources is inseparable from the world we already live in, where doctored photos are commonplace and AI-generated images are becoming equally routine. Knowledge is no longer a fixed thing, and what remains is the daily work of trying to discover what is really true.
Weronika Gęsicka, Near Dark, from the ENCYCLOPAEDIA series, 2023–2026
the photograph as the most convincing lie
Gęsicka deliberately chooses the photographic image as her primary illustrative medium to frame the Encyclopaedia’s argument, even when these images are constructed. Photography still carries an instinctive authority that no other medium has, and the artist uses this confidence as the ground upon which the work operates. “The intention to confuse and disorient the viewer was also one of the reasons why I used photographs, or images imitating photographs, in this work.” she explains. “Even today, we still believe that photography is the most objective medium, while it is one of the easiest ways to manipulate reality, especially in the age of artificial intelligence. When we see something in the form of a photograph, we immediately assume that it must be real. Perhaps after a moment doubts arise, but our first natural instinct is to just believe the photographs as we believe our own eyes.’ Relying on visual clichés, old-fashioned illustration styles, stock photography aesthetics, and images that already resemble memory, she constructs images so visually familiar that fiction registers, if at all, only after the fact.
a photographic project that subverts the idea of authoritative knowledge
records, memory and reinterpretation
Throughout her practice, Gęsicka has consistently worked with archival material, from images found randomly on the Internet to stock photo libraries, police records and press photographs, using them to explore what happens when historical photographs are subtly displaced, reframed or altered. “My works often refer to memory and history, both in the context of the individual and in the broader sense of collective memory.” shared with designboom. “That’s why I work with archives, which, when transformed, reveal their different layers. I try to look for connections between the past and the present, while showing that history is not something finite and closed, but can still be reinterpreted, which gives wide space for various manipulations.’ In the Encyclopedia, this impulse is extended to the encyclopedic form, a genre that has always carried the authority of the definitive, of things settled and agreed upon. “In the ‘Encyclopedia’, I also drew on images from the past: I was inspired by old illustrations, famous photographs and images that each of us carries somewhere in our memory. she adds. “Using various visual clichés, I wanted to create images that, through their familiar appearance, would blur the line between reality and fantasy as much as possible.”
Weronika Gęsicka, Jungftak #2, from the ENCYCLOPAEDIA series, 2023–2026
knowledge in the age of artificial intelligence and fake news
The book arrives as a current cultural item. For Gęsicka, the Encyclopedia is not just a curiosity about publishing bad things, but a meditation on the conditions of knowledge today. “We have more and more tools to help us separate truth from fiction, but it’s getting harder and harder to uncover that truth.” she reflects. An accompanying essay by Charlotte Cotton, an internationally recognized curator and theorist of photography, situates the work within wider debates around image manipulation, artificial intelligence and the epistemology of the visual. The Encyclopedia is published by Blow Up Press and Jednostka Gallery, Warsaw, with book design by Aneta Kowalczyk. Gęsicka is currently nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2026.
Weronika Gęsicka, Jungftak #2 (detail), from the series ENCYCLOPAEDIA, 2023–2026
Jungftak, (n.) a Persian bird; the male of which had only one wing, on the right side, and the female only one wing, on the left side. The male had a bone hook and the female a bone eye. and it was by joining hook and eye that they were able to fly.
Weronika Gęsicka, Jungftak #1, from the ENCYCLOPAEDIA series, 2023–2026
Spanish tickler, a kind of instrument of torture, consisting of long, sharp iron spikes curved to resemble claws. It was often attached to a handle or used as an extension of the torturer’s hand. In this way, they used it to tear and tear the flesh from the bones. from any part of the body. It was also used as a weapon
Weronika Gęsicka, Lawrence Douglas Versett, from the ENCYCLOPEDIA series, 2023–2
Versett, Lawrence Douglas (c. 1891 – 5 July 1965), pioneer Alberta homesteader, amateur pilot and master tool maker. It is the namesake of the Douglas Range in the Alberta Rockies.
MacMasters, Alan (born 1865), a Scottish scientist, credited with creating the first electric bread toaster. His invention was developed by Crompton, Stephen J. Cook & Company as the Eclipse.
Gęsicka deliberately chooses the photographic image as her main indicative medium
Weronika Gęsicka, Eachy #3, from the ENCYCLOPAEDIA series, 2023–2026
Weronika Gęsicka, Dord, from the ENCYCLOPAEDIA series, 2023–2026
a broader reckoning of how we navigate information today
Dayton, Robert, American artist, born in Pasadena, California. Blinded in an accident in 1968, Dayton has since experimented with gases that emit odors similar to strong body odor. His work, called Perfume-Art. performed in a sealed chamber where the audience inhales scented air.
project information:
name: Encyclopaedia
artist: Weronika Gęsicka | @wgesicka
report: Charlotte Cotton | @pimcharlottecotton
book design: Aneta Kowalczyk @_aneta_kowalczyk_
publisher: Press Blow Up | @blow_up_press and Gallery Unit | @unitgalleryWarsaw, Poland
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