Keynote Lecture: "AI and Visual Culture: A Theory of Latent Spaces"

Public event without registration
Data: 12.05.2025
Ora: 18:00 - 19:15
Relatore: Antonio Somaini
Luogo: Villino Stroganoff, Via Gregoriana 22, 00187 Rome and online
Contatto: katja.hackstein@biblhertz.it

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.

Antonio Somaini is Professor of Film, Media and Visual Culture Theory at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. He is a Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF), with a research project on the impact of AI on visual culture and contemporary art. Among his recent publications, the article "Algorithmic Images: Artificial Intelligence and Visual Culture" (Grey Room 93, Fall 2023) and the book Culture visuelle. Images, regards, médias, dispositifs (with Andrea Pinotti, Presses du Réel, 2022, revised translation of Cultura visuale. Immagini, sguardi, media, dispositivi, Einaudi, 2016).He is currently the chief curator of the exhibition Le monde selon l'IA / The World Through AI at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris (11 April - 21 September 2025)

The Keynote Lecture is part of the conference: "Machine Bildwissenschaft"

Please follow the lecture also online on our Vimeo Channel: https://vimeo.com/event/5064144

Scientific Organization: Leonardo Impett

_{Image: The World
through AI: Exploring Latent Spaces (ed Antonio Somaini) [copertina], Jean
Boîte Éditions 2025}