Project period: March 2025 – Feb. 2028.

Each year the network organizes two types of activities: a workshop for network participants and an open academic seminar. An international conference will be organized ultimo 2027 

The AIsthesis project is a research network that brings together Danish, Swedish and Norwegian humanist researchers with the aim of exploring how artificial intelligence (AI) changes contemporary image culture. All network participants, individually or in smaller groups, conduct research in the new, interdisciplinary field that studies the influence of AI technology on imagery (still and moving images). The network serves an important function as a research community where individual scholars benefits from engaging in workshops, seminars and discussions with academic colleagues also focusing on AI and images from an aesthetic perspective. 
  
Network members: Amanda Wasielewski (Uppsala University), Anna Näslund (Stockholm University), Asker Bryld Staunæs (Aarhus University), Aurora Hoel (NTNU, Trondheim), Gabriele de Seta (University of Bergen), Kristoffer Ørum (Copenhagen University), Lea Laura Nørregaard Michelsen (Aarhus University), Liv Hausken (University of Oslo), Lotte Philipsen (Aarhus University) Lukas R.A. Wilde (NTNU, Trondheim), Maja Bak Herrie (Aarhus University), Naja Le Fevre Grundtmann (University of Southern Denmark), Nicolas René Maleve (Aarhus University), Sebastian Rozenberg (Linköping University).
PI: Lotte Philipsen (Aarhus University)

Founding: AIsthesis is generously funded by the Independent Research Foundation Denmark with 791.346 DKK (grant ID: 10.46540/4362-00032B).

Background and relevance of the Aisthesis project

Today, most large AI models are multimodal in the sense that text, image, and sound are technically intertwined in them [1, 2]. However, the exploration of AI-based analysis, generation and use of imagery as aesthetic research object has received little attention compared to the focus on applicable technical methods (e.g. using AI for analysing large image collections) in the field of Digital Humanities [3-6] and the support for text and large language models [7]. In Denmark, humanistic research on the visual cultures of AI is confined to a few temporary research projects in different institutional settings [8-12]. The network serves an important function as a research community where individual scholars benefits from engaging in workshops, seminars and discussions with academic colleagues also focusing on AI and images from an aesthetic perspective. 

A humanistic approach founded in aesthetic theory is particularly relevant when researching the implications and effects of AI technology on contemporary visual cultures, because images are more ambiguous than text [13, 14]. An image’s specific style, motif, format, or form of circulation cannot by rule be translated to specific meanings, except from picto-grams, and as a result, the power of images to shape cultural beliefs is often, paradoxical-ly, overlooked [14, 15]. However, in a cultural landscape with female popes [16]; old “photographs” revealing that King Leopold II of Belgium was black [17]; “starship Enterprise in the style of Frida Kahlo”; and deepfakes of U.S. presidents [18], adequate research in AI imagery requires profound image theoretical insights as offered in the disciplines of aes-thetics and art history. The network creates a crucial intersection between several broad research fields (AI in the humanities, visual culture research, and aesthetic theory in general) by concentrating on aesthetic implications of AI in visual culture. By centring aesthetics as its core theoretical approach, the network constitutes a focused space for ex-change in a research area that tends to be diluted in the more general research settings of digital aesthetics and AI in the humanities. The network participants’ academic back-grounds represent a variety of approaches and insights in aesthetics, which allows for qualified and nuanced research exchanges in the network.  

In the Scandinavian countries, national libraries, museums, and public service organisations are official state repositories for our common visual heritage, and with the digitization of everything from paintings to arial photographs, old films and documentaries etc. it is now possible to activate this material in new manners by using AI in different ways. For instance, AI technology can be used to: search archives by use of image recognition tools [19-21]; train AI models using national image data sets [5]; based on this, generate new synthetic imagery [22]; which could possibly be archived by the national institutions. Institutions can in different ways embrace, reject, or negotiate these AI opportunities [23] but in any case, privately developed AI models call for considerations on the roles that public institutions in Scandinavian welfare states play in aesthetically shaping visual her-itage.  
  
Despite the heavy and rapidly growing influence of AI technology on imagery, no university departments in Scandinavia are dedicated to exploring the aesthetic implication of this development in depth from a humanistic point of view. AIsthesis enables structured collective activities among the participants, which strengthens and qualifies research in the field.