Cultural Politics of the Computational Image

Computer vision and computational photography is proliferating rapidly worldwide, transforming the cultural understanding of image making in the process. While facial recognition technologies have been subject to considerable debate in the English-language press, their uneven global spread and reception is often glossed over and poorly understood. Beyond the face, the increasing role of automated image processing in areas like entertainment, social media, transportation, and surveillance is only just beginning to be grappled with from a visual culture perspective. This focused 2-day workshop from the MIT Global Mediations Lab aims to bring together scholars coming at these questions from humanities and critical media studies approaches, and focusing on cultural contexts beyond the United States.

The workshop will feature a mix of public presentations from participants, and private sessions dedicated to discussing these issues as a group, with the aim of laying the groundwork for a future edited volume. We hope to be able to cover all or most of transportation and accommodations for invited participants. Possible paper topics include:

• Situating computational imaging in specific cultural and political contexts
• National/regional computational imaging research and history
• Implementation of computational imaging in public and private spaces
• The geopolitics of image collection and data storage
• Environmental impacts of global imaging infrastructures
• Artistic and theoretical explorations of computational imaging as a cultural practice

The workshop will take place on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts on April 25-26, 2025. Acceptance notifications have been sent; schedule will be announced in March. Inquiries may be sent to workshop organizer and Global Mediations Lab lead Paul Roquet.