The history of visual cultures is periodically marked by the appearance of new images and new technologies of vision: images that introduce new forms of representation, and technologies of vision that introduce new ways of seeing, extending and reorganizing the field of the visible, while redrawing the borders between what can and what cannot be seen. In some cases, such changes produce only marginal transformations, whose effects can be felt only within specific areas of a specific visual culture, while in other cases the transformations are vast, tectonic shifts. This is what is currently happening, in a new phase in which artificial intelligence, machine learning and neural networks are transforming profoundly the ways in which images are produced, modified, circulated, and seen, raising a whole series of aesthetic, epistemological, and political challenges, and leading us to question what we still mean by “image” and “vision” in the context of such vast transformations.

The five speakers of the NECS Online Lecture Series Machine Visions: The Impact of AI on Contemporary Visual Culture and Artistic Practices – Emanuele Arielli, Tega Brain, Egor Kraft, Helena Nikonole, Joanna Zylinska – will tackle different aspects of this issue, focusing on the emergence of a new “artificial aesthetics” and of a new “extended aesthetic mind” (Arielli), on different possible approaches to the use of neural networks in art (Nikonole), on the way in which AI leads us to question again the status of human and nonhuman “creativity” (Zylinska), on the use of machine-learning processes in historical analysis (Kraft), and on the idea of the code as a “creative medium” (Brain).

The Online Lecture Series is co-organized by Antonio Somaini(Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris) together with Alexandra Anikina (London South Bank University, currently Balzan Postdoctoral Fellow within the research project “Aesthetics in the Present”). It is supported by NECS and by 2019 Prix Balzan, of which Jacques Aumont was the recipient.

The series consists of five lectures that will take place on Zoom between February and May 2022, starting on Tuesday, February 8th, 2022. The Online Lecture Series is open to the public and will be accessible by registration.

Program