Continuity and Rupture in the Age of Automated Images

Speaker

Dr Amanda Wasielewski (https://www.uu.se/en/contact-and-organisation/staff?query=N22-2814), Associate Professor of Digital Humanities and Docent of Art History in the Department of ALM (Archives, Libraries, Museums) at Uppsala University, Sweden

Amanda Wasielewski is an art historian and artist. As an art historian, her research investigates the use of digital technology in relation to art, visual culture and spatial practice. Her recent focus has been on the use of artificial intelligence techniques for the analysis and creation of art and other visual media. Wasielewski is the author of four monographs: Made in Brooklyn: Artists, Hipsters, Makers, Gentrifiers (Zero, 2018), From City Space to Cyberspace: Art, Squatting, and Internet Culture in the Netherlands (Amsterdam University Press, 2021), Computational Formalism: Art History and Machine Learning (MIT Press, 2023), and Digital Photography After AI: Continuity and Rupture in the Age of Automated Images (MIT Press, 2026). She also co-edited the volume Critical Digital Art History: Interface and Data Politics in the Post-Digital Era (Intellect, 2024). In 2023 she was awarded a grant from Google’s Artists + Machine Intelligence program for her work on photography and AI. Wasielewski has recently served as an advisor to the Swedish parliament and collaborated with the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre on cultural policy and AI. She is a practicing artist and has exhibited her work internationally.

Abstract

In recent years, artificial intelligence technologies have made it easy for anyone to produce images that look indistinguishable from photographs. How do these AI-generated images change our understanding of photography? Should we consider them photography at all? In her book Digital Photography After AI (https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262056397/digital-photography-after-ai/) (MIT Press, December 2026), Amanda Wasielewski explores these questions as well as the historical and theoretical concerns for the field of photography after the widespread uptake of AI tools. In this talk, Wasielewski addresses AI-generated images in terms of the technique, form, and function of photography throughout its history, as well as the documentary function of photography, image resolution and filter effects, the surreal and real quality of photographs and AI-generated images, and the latter’s impact on representation and illusion.

Access

Events are free and open to all unless otherwise stated. The seminar will take place from 5-6pm and is followed by a drinks reception in the English Social Space from 6-7pm.

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