Episode Two explores the benefits and disadvantages of going unseen by surveillance technologies. We examine notions of visibility and invisibility in the context of AI imaging systems with author and professor Simone Browne, artist Sondra Perry, and artist and academic Mimi Onuoha.

The book displays a close up of a human brain with layers of memory and dreams visualized through a method of psychoanalysis and pharmacological propaganda. It is composed of two scientific researches that investigated the theme of memory and psychoanalysis. The first photos ever realized of sections of the human brain by psychiatric G. Jelgersma at the University of Leiden (1908-1911) are paired with the transcript of narcoanalytic sessions conducted by the controversial psychiatrist Prof. Jan Bastiaans at the end of the 1980’s. He used LSD as well as Pentothal, also known as the “truth serum” in the therapy of patients ...

As the physical world degrades and so corrodes the credibility of institutions that enable consumption, the status quo in the global north goes virtual. Within a short time, we’ve witnessed a rapidly increasing capacity to design, simulate and conjure a virtual perception of reality with exactitude and definition. Our ability to simulate reality has come to match our ability to record it. We’re able to simulate and produce a photographic image of an object without any need for the object itself. The same goes for retouched images and the act of retouching. As a result, images no longer need to ...

In The Age of Total Images, art historian Ana Peraica focuses on the belief that the shape of the planet is two-dimensional which has been reawakened in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and the ways in which these ‘flat Earth’ conspiracy theories are symptomatic of post-digital image culture. Such theories, proven to be false both in Antiquity and Modernity, but once held to be true in the Medieval Period, have influenced a return to a kind of ‘New Medievalism’. By tracing visual representations of the planet across Western history and culture, Peraica provides support for a media-based explanation behind ...

Can computers be creative? Is algorithmic art just a form of Candy Crush? Cutting through the smoke and mirrors surrounding computation, robotics and artificial intelligence, Joanna Zylinska argues that, to understand the promise of AI for the creative fields, we must not confine ourselves solely to the realm of aesthetics. Instead, we need to address the role and position of the human in the current technical setup—including the associated issues of labour, robotisation and, last but not least, extinction. Offering a critique of the socio-political underpinnings of AI, AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams raises poignant questions about the ...

In this episode Vivian and Noah purchase David Young’s piece titled Winter Woods, a work produced using a GAN, leading to a larger discussion around art created using AI. Artist, researcher, and podcaster Mat Dryhurst helps explain how AI works, as well as how DALLE-2 , a new AI system from OpenAI is different from other GANs. We also hear from artist Super Metal Bosch, one of the artists behind the GAN art project Super Metal Mons. Vivian goes on to compare AI to photography and the art of being a clown, which goes over Noah’s head. Artist Carlos Sanchez ...

As an institutional practice, archival practices often tend to serve to colonization, surveillance and discipline society of the Modern world. In the last ten years, with the digital technology and social movement detecting, recording and accumulating images become a civil activity. Thus, archiving videos and other types of visual images brought also non-institutional practices and as well contemporary discussions related to image, open source, collectivity and forensics. Beside interviews with video activists; this book compiles several writers’ articles on their practices and discussions of archives from several angles: forensics, decolonization and commons.

In her 2012 White Shadows: What is Missing from Images lecture at the Gdansk Academy of Fine Arts in Poland, Hito Steyerl speaks about how new technologies force us to reformulate important questions about the making visible, capturing, and documenting of information. In the first part of her talk, Steyerl focuses on the use of 3D scanning in forensic crime scene investigations. Steyerl explains how the 3D scanner, or LiDAR technology (Light Detection And Ranging), sends laser beams that reflect off of the surfaces of the objects that are being scanned. In this process, each point in space is measured ...

Photography has been used as a tool to record our bodies from the creation of the first mugshots in the late 19th century to recent developments in facial recognition technology. In the first episode of Mirror with a Memory, artist Zach Blas and filmmaker and scholar Manthia Diawara will discuss what it means to leave it to machines to verify our identities.

Since the coming of image technologies (and particularly with photography, video, and the Web) contemporary culture has lost control over images, which became more and more independent from their author. Luca Panaro formulates his thesis by reinterpreting the works of theorists (Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, Vilém Flusser), writers (Luigi Pirandello, Italo Calvino, Penelope Lively), even film directors (Buster Keaton, Michelangelo Antonioni, Wayne Wang), and finally contemporary artists (Franco Vaccari, Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, Wolfgang Staehle, Roberto Cuoghi, Carlo Zanni, Eva and Franco Mattes).

Since the coming of image technologies (and particularly with photography, video, and the Web) contemporary culture has lost control over images, which became more and more independent from their author. Luca Panaro formulates his thesis by reinterpreting the works of theorists (Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, Vilém Flusser), writers (Luigi Pirandello, Italo Calvino, Penelope Lively), even film directors (Buster Keaton, Michelangelo Antonioni, Wayne Wang), and finally contemporary artists (Franco Vaccari, Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, Wolfgang Staehle, Roberto Cuoghi, Carlo Zanni, Eva and Franco Mattes).

The (political) power of memes has moved beyond virtual images. The distinction between the virtual and ‘real life’ no longer applies, or perhaps was never really there. Their effects (or should we say affects?) are moving through digital infrastructures, policy, regulations and bodies. If memes are used as a tool by the alt-right to mobilize people to storm the Capitol and play a substantial role in the Ukrainian war, can they also be used by the left to spark a revolution, as memetic warfare is more immediate and accessible than real-life demonstrations? What kind of labor would that require? What ...