OUR RESEARCH

The research group The Ontology of the Image brings together an international network of artists, theorists, and educators to investigate how images act, generate, and transform in today’s techno-autocratic regimes of visibility. Rather than treating the image as representation or message, the group approaches it as an ontological agent: a self-steering force that organises perception, value, and affect. From the static and moving image to the recursive, synthetic, and AI-generated image, the contemporary condition of imaging has shifted from signification to operation. Images now choreograph attention and desire across machinic infrastructures, creating new forms of obsolescence and psychic saturation.

This progressive desensitisation is not merely a by-product of technological abundance but has become a strategic component of contemporary propaganda and information warfare. When images accumulate beyond the threshold of perceptual processing, they no longer persuade primarily through meaning, but through atmospheric saturation. In such conditions, imaging often precedes aggression: perceptual environments are prepared, moods are modulated, and attention is exhausted before overt conflict emerges. The political force of images therefore lies not only in what they depict, but in how many there are and how they circulate. To engage with imaging critically today thus requires shifting from a representational understanding of images to an infrastructural one – recognising image production, distribution, and amplification as components of a larger system that shapes perception itself. Within this context, treating images as part of a critical infrastructure is not simply an analytical move but an ethical stance.

This “post-representational” condition demands theoretical, artistic, and pedagogical re-orientation. The group aims to explore how such images come to be, how they affect human becoming, and how they may be re-imagined through critical, artistic, and affective practices.

TRAVELING RESEARCH SEMINARS

You didn’t come this far to stop

The group adopts a nomadic seminar model – a “travelling circus” – in which members meet at participating institutions for one-day intensive gatherings titled One Day About the Ontology of the Image. Each event combines talks, discussions, and workshops with students and colleagues, developing a living discourse that unfolds across institutions and contexts. The seminars function simultaneously as research laboratories, teaching experiments, and publication incubators. Each host institution curates its own edition with a common conceptual thread and a distinct local inflection. Participants bring a “+ friend” – a colleague or collaborator – to expand the dialogue and embed it within wider research ecologies. The seminars are documented and reflected upon collectively, generating material for future co-authored publications, book chapters, and essays that trace the development of the project’s thought and practice. The seminars would also directly benefit the host, either through her research community, staff or students.