Centre for Aesthetics of AI Images (AIIM) was established in 2022 and focuses on the intersection between three key concepts:

AESTHETICS constitutes the centre’s fundamental theoretical and analytical approach to exploring AI images. By ‘aesthetics’ we understand a wide variety of theoretical approaches, such as (but not limited to) the work by, Jacques Ranciére, Sianne Ngai, Yves Citton, Immanuel Kant, Rita Felski, Gilbert Simondon, and Olga Gourinova. Hence, the centre is solidly founded in the humanities and focuses specifically on the potentials of aesthetic theory to explore and comprehend AI image practices.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) is an overall lay cultural term covering a range of machine learning practices that train computer models to extract dominating features from big data sets. The centre is particularly focused on AI that relate to ‘visuality’ (e.g.: pixel-resolution, vector-graphics, camera-settings), image analysis (e.g.: object detection, heatmaps) and image generation (e.g.: GANs, text-to-image models).

IMAGES as cultural phenomena are at the very core of the centre’s focus. Whereas the centre’s theoretical approach is confined to aesthetics, potential objects of research cover all images and image practices that are somehow related to AI (e.g.: Renaissance paintings feed into a training data set, deepfake porn videos, faces automatically popping up on screens in surveillance systems, synthetic stock photo, GAN art, cluster visualizations).