Machine Bildwissenschaft
- Public event without registration
- Date: May 12, 2025
- Time: 11:00 AM - 07:15 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Conference
- Location: Villino Stroganoff, Via Gregoriana 22, 00187 Rome
- Contact: katja.hackstein@biblhertz.it

Combining digital art history with critical AI studies, the group explores AI not only as a tool but also as a cultural phenomenon with important implications for the humanities. The conference investigates the reciprocal relationship between artificial intelligence and visual culture, looking at how AI systems both shape and are shaped by histories of seeing. We welcome both international experts and the group’s first two members.
Program
Monday, May 12th
11:00-11:15 Welcome Leonardo Impett (BHMPI): An introduction to the Machine Visual Culture Research Group
11:15 - 12:15 Panel 1
11:15 - 11:35 Fabian Offert (University of
California, Santa Barbara), Vector Media: Towards a Materialist
Epistemology of Artificial Intelligence
Vector Media offers a media theory of the black box,
tracing how deep neural networks encode latent ideologies through their
internal architectures—particularly the technique of embedding, which turns all
media into abstract, commensurable vectors. Rather than focusing solely on
datasets or outputs, Vector Media explores the epistemic shift that embeds
historical models of vision, perception, and meaning within neural
infrastructures, revealing how AI models do not just process media but model
media itself. Drawing on Phil Agre’s “Critical Technical Practice,” we argue
that this transformation produces a new kind of epistemology—neural exchange
value—where cultural objects gain significance only through their operational
equivalence within machine learning systems.
11:35 - 11:55 M. Beatrice Fazi (University of
Sussex), Towards a Transcendental Philosophy of Computation
This talk presents a transcendental framework for
understanding generative artificial intelligence (AI). Via the example of large
language models (LLMs), it contends that these programmes perform activities of
synthesis, constructing an internal representational reality. The synthetic
unity achieved is structural—not the unity of a self, but the unity of a
structure that structures. By extending the philosophical concept of Kantian
synthesis beyond human cognition, the talk examines how computational systems
engage in a search for unity that organises distributed representations into
coherent, if imperfect, wholes. This transcendental approach recognises the
alterity of LLM outputs while highlighting their world-making capacity.
11:55 - 12:15 Discussion
12:15 - 13:15 Lunch (speakers only)
13:15 - 13:30 Breakout Groups
13:30 - 14:30 Panel 2
13:30 - 13:50 Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal (University of
Basel), What, for AI, is style?
Style abounds in technical and popular discourses of
AI, whether it be the first 'uses' of LLMs and diffusion models (where the
text/image were to be generated 'in the style of' another) or the technical
genealogies of AI that arise out of 'style transfer' mechanisms over a decade
ago. This talk puts the technical substrate of style today in conversation with
the long history of style in visual studies and literary studies. In doing so,
it simply asks what, for AI, is style? Is it the same as the (conflicted
histories and theories of) style in humanistic disciplines? And regardless of
what the answers to these questions look like, what may be their implications
thereof for humanistic and technical scholarship today?
13:50 - 14:10 Tristan Dot
(University of Cambridge), The order of design. Patterns of
invention / alienation – in the nineteenth-century British textile industry
Textile patterns – from all regions, periods, and media
– were copied, modified, and recombined on the drawing tables of Victorian
designers. By studying – in all their materiality, at the level of the
sketching paper itself – the habits of these workers, a specific mode of
invention emerges, in which repetition and experimentation go hand in hand.
These patterns of invention – with their copyright issues, and
quasi-interpolation practices – resonate with our current digital, vector-based
visual culture.
14:10 – 14:30 Discussion
14:30 – 15:00 Coffee
15:00 – 16:00 Panel 3
15:00 – 15:20 Ellen Charlesworth (Durham University),
Objective/Subjective: Theorising Digital Art History
A growing body of work on bias has highlighted just
how culturally situated—and subjective—computational methods are. However, in
media theory, philosophy, and art history today, the very notion of the
post-Cartesian subject is under fire. Drawing on object-orientated ontology and
the materiality turn, this talk will explore whether digital art history can
reconcile the tension between objective and subjective at the heart of digital
disciplines.
15:20 – 15:40 Noa Garcia (Osaka University), Bias in the Frame: Unpacking Social
Stereotypes in AI-Generated Imagery
Generating images from textual descriptions requires
the generative model to make implicit assumptions about the output scene that
are not explicitly instructed in the input prompt. These assumptions can
reinforce unfair stereotypes related to gender, race, or socioeconomic status.
However, measuring and quantifying these social biases in generated images is a
big challenge. In this talk, we will explore methods for measuring gender bias
in text-to-image models, particularly Stable Diffusion, and discuss how the
generated images, when used to train future computer vision models, affect bias
in downstream tasks.
15:40 – 16:00 Discussion
16:00 – 16:30 Coffee
16:30 – 17:30 Panel 4
16:30 – 16:50 Eryk Salvaggio (researcher and new
media artist), This is (not) an Image of Noise: Creative Reflections on Diffusion Models
Eryk Salvaggio reflects on the role of noise in AI systems and in his
creative practice, which engages with images of noise as a tool for forcing
errors of recognition, and therefore media production, in diffusion models. The
process of noising and denoising in multimodal generative AI includes
"visual" mediums of images and video, but extends also to music,
which is generated through images of sound. Salvaggio explores noise in his
creative practice as the opposite of machinic categorization, and an overlooked
element of attempts to trace the inscription of patterns from training data
into generated media.
16:50 – 17:10 Maya Indria Ganesh (University of
Cambridge)(Zoom) What is critical digital art
(now)?
The 2013–2022 decade is marked by critical
media arts and storytelling that held a mirror to algorithmic society, drawing
attention to the political and moral economies of the embodied and situated
human grappling with the loss of privacy, the performance/commodification of
the self/identity, surveillance, algorithmic control v human agency. Artists
working in this period also imagine possibilities for resisting and reforming
these systems. The question of what critical digital art practice is now
informs this talk. I will review recent artworks to discuss three dimensions of
critical digital visual art that negotiates AI as tool and as text: inversions
of institutional authority; the resources required of art practice; and how/if
critical art practice can address latent space.
17:10 – 17:30 Discussion
17:30 – 18:00 Break
18:00 – 19:15 Keynote: Antonio Somaini (Université
Sorbonne Nouvelle), AI
and Visual Culture: A Theory of Latent Spaces
A theory of images and visual culture, today, needs a
theory of latent spaces. In a historical phase in which images are more and
more generated, modified, circulated, seen and described by or with the help of
different kinds of AI models, we need to understand the crucial role played by
an abstract, mathematical construct whose cultural and political implications
could hardly be overestimated. Latent spaces play also a central role in the
contemporary artistic practices that engage with AI: whether to critically
respond to its increasing presence in every aspect of culture, society,
politics and economics, or to use it as a series of new tools for artistic
production. For a few years now, artists have developed different strategies to
explore or modify the existing, dominant latent spaces, or to produce their own
alternative, antagonist, counter-hegemonic ones. Several of these strategies
are documented in the exhibition The World Through AI, curated by Antonio
Somaini (with Ada Ackerman, Alexandre Gefen and Pia Viewing as associate
curators) and on view at the Jeu de Paume in Paris between April 11th and
September 21st, 2025. Taken together, they show the awareness with which the
field of contemporary art is tackling the presence and the agency of this hidden
layer of mathematical abstraction that is profoundly transforming the status of
images and vision, as well as the relations between images and other media.
20:30 - 21:05 Screening of Eryk Salvaggio’s film “Human Movie“ (https://www.cyberneticforests.com/news/human-movie-six-meditations-on-a-compression-algorithm-2025)
21:05-22:00 Questions and discussion
Scientific Organization: Leonardo Impett
Image: ai.biennial.com - UBERMORGEN, Leonardo Impett, Joasia Krysa, Eva Cetinic, MetaObjects, Sui: ‘The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine’ (2021)