PhD | ‘Seeing with, by, and of AI: Mapping the Regimes of Algorithmic Vision’ – Natalia Stanusch
*Image Credit: Anne Fehres and Luke Conroy & AI4Media / Better Images of AI / Humans Do The Heavy Data Lifting / CC-BY 4.0
PhD | ‘Seeing with, by, and of AI: Mapping the Regimes of Algorithmic Vision.’
PhD-candidate: Natalia Stanusch
Supervisors: Prof. dr. Richard Rogers and Dr. Natalia Sánchez-QuerubínInstitution: University of Amsterdam (ASCA)
Images and computation come together in many fundamental sites of contemporary culture. Huge volumes of digital images and visual data that they constitute are a part of the social, political, commercial, and creative domains of our lives; these include the often-controversial surveillance practices that rely on face recognition, social media selfies and the filters that modify them, and, more recently, the new images created with generative AI like Midjourney. This PhD project responds to a growing academic and societal need to investigate how digital images are produced, analyzed, and ‘put to work’ with particular ways of seeing and within algorithmic ‘scopic regimes’ that shape and affect people’s lives. The latter refers to how ways of seeing, representing, and understanding are linked to systems of knowledge and power, whereby how, who, and what we see are tightly linked to algorithmic logics and AI imaginaries. This Ph.D. project aims to critique and map contemporary algorithmic scopic regimes, focusing specifically on generative AI technology and the platform gaze. I organize my study around the notions of mapping and digital methods, and three entry concepts and case studies, each envisioned as a chapter of the dissertation: Infrastructure (‘mapping of’) (as in ‘making visible’); Moderation (‘mapping with’); and Prompting (‘mapping by’).