Dec. 2022 – March 2026

The research project ‘NEW VISIONS: Image cultures in the era of AI’ investigates how vision and image analysis in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) informs and changes cultural understandings and uses of images.The project provides thorough humanistic analyses of how the current technical redistribution of what is visible/invisible, viewer/viewed, image creator/consumer in contemporary AI vision practices relates to cultural redistributions of who has the power to look, decide what we look for, suggest how we act as objects of new gazes, and how we create and use images.

The project explores two overall questions: What aesthetic and epistemological consequences do new AI image practices have? and further, how do these consequences manifest themselves in a broader cultural and societal context? The primary activity of analyzing cultural implications is conducted by comparing humanistic knowledge on vision and images with new practices in AI vision. Specifically, the project focuses on how AI face filters and deepfakes in popular culture alter relations between face and identity, and on how the concepts of representation and truths are negotiated in the different ways AI images aim to produce knowledge.

‘NEW VISIONS: Image cultures in the era of AI’ is generously funded with 2MM DKK by Aarhus University Research Foundation (https://auff.au.dk/en) and runs Dec. 2022 – March 2026. The project is carried out by Lotte Philipsen (PI) and postdocs Lea Laura Michelsen and Maja Bak Herrie.