DETERMINED_DETERMINING 2025/26
Algorithmic and AI-supported collage practices for the visual negotiation of power and violence in documentary contexts
TEACHING
SYNOPSIS
How do humans and machines co-produce the visual negotiation of violence within algorithmic and AI-based systems, and which discourses of power do they reproduce or transform along the way? The seminar pursues this question by reading and by making. Collage, assemblage and montage serve as the 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 examines how algorithmic systems filter violence, frame it, and render it visible or invisible. Students work with search engines, image platforms and generative systems, draw on documentary research projects that handle image material forensically, and ask whose perspectives are missing and how a system frames a depiction of violence.
Collaging serves here as a practice of pointing something out by opening it up. The seminar looks for the exclusions a system produces and the contradictions that emerge when students set fragments beside one another, on the assumption that re-ordering material amounts to a form of critique.
Over the semester break, students each develop a work on a subject of violence they choose themselves, using algorithmic and AI-supported systems as co-producers. A logbook runs alongside the making and records the failures, the stalls, and the unconscious patterns that come through. The seminar closes with a panel at which students present their works, together with a written reflection connecting the practice back to the reading.