“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, interview response to his self-portrait painting Son of Man (1964)

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.

The processes of computation and automation that produce digitized objects 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, and text?

link to dissertation: here