Join us on Wednesday 2nd April 2025, 12:30-14:00 at Borough Road Gallery, for a presentation by visiting researcher Lorenzo Aimo entitled “(Re)Framing GenAI from a Post-Photographic Perspective: Images Inside and Outside AI”. All welcome.
What is happening to the concept of the “image” in the era of Generative AI? This broad theoretical question lies at the core of my research, whose aim is to investigate which socio-technical processes images undergo inside and outside deep learning algorithms across different scales.
Within contemporary networks, GenAI is ultimately establishing a technical, post-optical, and algorithmically defined perspective on images that prioritizes machine readability and their operationalization. This perspective originated from earlier post-photographic and grid-based conceptions that envisioned photographic images’ surface as a calculable entity, following an epistemological lineage in which AI functions as late capitalism’s project of knowledge extraction, with measurement as its foundational principle.
As input for AI models’ training phase, the value of images derives from their being repositories of data and metadata. From the level of the single pixel to vast datasets containing billions of images, once gathered, ordered and classified, they form the epistemic boundary within which AI systems operate. As outputs of recent text-to-image models, images are products of deep, black-boxed algorithmic operations unfolding in the so-called latent space. Although they appear to belong to the human canon of visual representation, AI generated images stand as interfaces between human-visual and machine-invisual readability.
This talk will be the occasion to outline the structure of my research and introduce my text, “AI Generated Images: Postcards of Computational Meaning from Latent Space”, which represents a first attempt to articulate these ideas.
Lorenzo Aimo (he/him) is a PhD student enrolled in the national program ILF (Image, Language, Figures: Forms and Modes of Mediation) managed by the University of Milan in collaboration with the University of Bologna. He holds an MA in Semiotics and completed his thesis in Visual Studies at the University of Bologna, where he collaborates with FAF (Photography, Art, Feminisms: History, Theory and Practices of Resistance in the Contemporary Culture) research centre for the project Italian Feminist Photography. He also is part of the organizing committee of the graduate students’ workshop “AVEC – Arts, Visuality and Electronic Culture”. His research interests include image theory, photography, GenAI, and visual culture. He is currently a visiting researcher at CSNI.