Artificial intelligence technologies are currently transforming the field of visual culture. AI video generators, trained on vast amounts of existing image data and capable of translating linguistic descriptions or prompts into hyper-realistic synthetic image sequences, are turning the archive of images from the past into a source of latent, previously unseen images. Hardly anyone has worked as intensively on this subject in recent years as the film and media scholar Antonio Somaini. Together with Somaini, the doctoral students will discuss the influence of ‹algorithmic vision› on the visual dispositives of the present – and how its history can be written.
The course consists of an evening lecture, a subsequent workshop with joint readings and active participation by the doctoral students, and a guided visit to the exhibition «Le monde selon l’IA», curated by Somaini, at the Jeu de Paume in Paris (6 June). Funded by the Graduate School of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Zurich.