Program Description: Parallax Futures is an experimental studio and educational program that engages with how technology and design impact thought and matter.
“Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.”
René Magritte in an interview response to his 1964 self-portrait painting Son of Man
ExA Lead: Samine Joudat
Contact: [email protected] @saminejoudat
**The Networked Image
****Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, G. Cox, A. Dekker, A. Dewdney, and K. Sluis. “Affordances of the Networked Image”. The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 2021 Link.
Table of Contents
The processes of computation and automation that produce digitized images have displaced the concept of an image once conceived through optical devices such as a photographic plate or a camera mirror that were invented to accommodate the human eye. Computational images exist as information within networks mediated by coded machines. They are increasingly less about what art history understands as representation or photography considers indexing and more an operational product of data processing determined by numerical information. Within this new reality, artificial intelligence (AI) applications are rapidly burgeoning as dominant sources of image production. What becomes of a visual world mediated first by data points from a specific training set expressed through tokens, pixels, text?
By appropriating AI tools and assembling an archive of case studies alongside research and theoretical inquiry, this Experimentation Area investigates how to interpret the differences between human and AI aesthetic processes and their respective effects on truth. During this week, we will read, discuss, ruminate, watch, interrogate, and experiment with what visuality can mean.
<aside> 💡 Goal: Fellows should come away with an understanding of the discontinuity between photography and computer vision/digital imaging. You will be encouraged and supported to construct a coherent research question related to the field that you will present to the cohort at the end of the week.
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We will trace a history that includes objects including photography, machine learning (ML) models such as GANs and diffusion models used in generative AI applications, computer vision, facial recognition programs, deepfakes, and simulations. Inquiries are centered around questions of aesthetics, ethics, visual culture, digital media, and computer science.
co-taught with Flora Weil, Adnan Afghani, and Oliver Evans
What is conceptual thinking in relation to technology?
What is the history of truth?
