DETERMINED_DETERMINING 2025/26
Collage, assemblage and montage as arts-based research on images of violence in algorithmic and AI systems
TEACHING
SYNOPSIS
How do algorithmic and AI-based systems shape the visual negotiation of violence, and which discourses of power do they reproduce or transform in the process? The seminar pursues this question through collages, assemblages and montages as methods of an arts-based research approach in which the artistic work is itself the research.
The first half of the term lays theoretical groundwork on power and violence, and puts it to work on the systems themselves: it examines how search engines, image platforms and generative systems filter violence, frame it, and render it visible or invisible.
From here the practical work begins. Taking apart an image exposes how it was made, and a found image is never neutral — it arrives already framed, carrying the authority of its source. Re-ordering its fragments opens that framing up for negotiation: this is where collage, assemblage and montage become critique rather than arrangement. Setting fragments beside one another brings out the exclusions a system produces and the contradictions it conceals.
Over the semester break, each participant develops a work on a subject of violence chosen within the seminar's field, working with algorithmic and AI-supported systems and negotiating the framings they carry. A logbook runs alongside the making and records the failures, the stalls, and the unconscious patterns that come through — the participant's own included.
The seminar closes with a panel at which participants present their works, together with a written reflection connecting the practice back to the theoretical groundwork.