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Keynote: The Generous Image

Our contemporary visual landscape is increasingly shaped by algorithmic systems that do not merely capture the world but actively generate new forms of seeing, sensing and knowing. While recent academic and public debate has understandably focused on the rise of generative AI systems – those capable of producing images from textual prompts – my talk proposes a broader and more radical claim: that all images today are potentially generative. Revisiting my previous work on photographic thinking and nonhuman vision, I will draw on the expanded sense of the concept of generativity as outlined, among others, at the Faculty of Design and Art at Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences. Going beyond its current computational framing, generativity in my argument will refer to a wide set of rule-based, apparatus-driven practices of image production, stretching from analogue photography to generative computer graphics and today’s diffusion-based AI models.
By tracing a genealogy of generative practices in photography and other forms of image making, from mid-20th-century experiments in generative aesthetics to contemporary post-photographic media, I will argue for a reimagining of the image as generous. Building on the shared etymology between ‘generativity’ and ‘generosity’, this concept offers an alternative to the dominant tropes of image degradation, epistemic violence and planetary destruction – Hito Steyerl’s ‘poor image’, ‘mean image’ and ‘hot image’ – by foregrounding the image’s capacity to exceed function, build relations and give itself to the viewer. Yet this generosity is not unambiguously positive or simplistically naive: it recognises that images can also fracture bodies and institutions, overload biological and technical systems, and colonise our senses and sensibilities. The generous image does not therefore automatically soothe or reconcile; rather, it opens a space of encounter marked by being summoned by something other than oneself.
The generous image, then, is a speculative figure for thinking with and through images at a time when human perception is increasingly fused with algorithmic infrastructures. It invites a critical but hopeful response to our current visual condition: one that does not retreat into nostalgia for lost realities but that seeks new vocabularies and modes of attention appropriate to a media ecology in flux, while seeking conditions of life that go beyond mere survival. The talk will engage with a variety of visual works, including some from my own practice.

JOANNA ZYLINSKA

Joanna Zylinska is an artist, writer, curator and Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King’s College London. She is an author of a number of books, including The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future Between the Eye and AI (MIT Press 2023, open access), AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams (Open Humanities Press 2020, open access) and Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press 2017). An advocate of ‘radical open-access’, Zylinska is an editor of the MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW book series for Open Humanities Press. Her art practice involves experimenting with different kinds of image-based media. She is currently researching perception and cognition as boundary zones between human and machine intelligence, while developing a concept of ‘data animism’ as a new epistemic framework for living in a generative image surround.

joannazylinska.net
@joanna.zylinska

Bild: © Joanna Zylinska

Pre, Present and Post Photographic Images

Gezeigt werden Werke von Janosch Boerckel (Mainz); Ben Christ, Maria Kaminska und Fernanda Braun Santos; Benjamin Friedle (Leipzig); Matthias Grund (Weimar); Karsten Kronas (Bielefeld); Bob Jones (Berlin); Simon Schnelle (Köln); Emilia Trog (Zürich).

From Apparatus of Capture to Generative Models

This talk looks at the shift from traditional perspectives on optical media — framing images as fixed visual representations of a view of the world captured in an instant — to recent methods involving machine learning, where what is visualized is the result of the statistical analysis of data. It will discuss historical instances and related theories in comparison with emerging methods in order to develop insights into how understandings of visual media may be impacted by the recent turn towards generative approaches to image-making. Drawing from research into the formulation of images in terms of algorithmic constraints and procedures, this work considers the significance of moving from deterministic processes towards those that are probabilistic. Not only has this impacted relationships between images and the world they are taken to represent, but it also reshapes the way we think about their relationships with other images and the systems these are mediated through.

Rosemary Lee

Rosemary Lee (b. 1986, Providence) is an artist and media researcher whose work considers how current discourses about art and technology are influenced by those of the past. Lee completed her PhD at the IT-University of Copenhagen in 2020. She is a guest assistant professor in the Multimedia program at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto.

rosemary-lee.com
@machine_agency

Bild: © Camila Mangueira, 2025

Collection of Babel

In 2019, during an Arts at CERN residency, I asked ~80 scientists the same speculative question: If you could obtain an impossible image—free of all physical, temporal, or computational limits—what would you create? The answers informed a taxonomy of impossibility, later developed into the BLOB of Im/Possible Images, a 3D environment modeled after the database object BLOB.
Today’s generative turn relocates impossibility from physics to infrastructure. I trace three contemporary modes of the impossible produced by the generative pipeline (capture → computation → ranking/circulation):
Governance-based impossibility: platform operations—compression, cropping, blurring, metadata rewriting, suppression/shadowbans, takedowns—can render technically feasible images operationally unrealizable in circulation.
Synthetic (model-ontological) impossibility: systems optimised for inference rather than human perception yield outputs coherent in model space yet illegible to humans; gaps in training data produce representational blind spots and symbolic drift (e.g., rainbow as icon vs atmospheric phenomenon).
Adversarial impossibility: dataset poisoning, backdoors, and physical/patch attacks exploit model vulnerabilities to induce misclassification or non-appearance, including artist-driven obfuscation tactics.
By tracing this shift, from the speculative impossible of the Collection of Babel to the infrastructural and algorithmic impossibles of platformed and AI-generated image,I argue that impossibility has become a key analytic for understanding contemporary image culture. Generativity is not just a technical process but also a site where power, visibility, and legibility are constantly negotiated.

Rosa Menkman

Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist and researcher of resolutions. Her work focuses on noise artifacts resulting from accidents in both analog and digital media.
The journey of her protagonist, the Angel of History (inspired by Paul Klee’s 1920 monoprint, Angelus Novus, and conceptualized by Walter Benjamin in 1940) functions as a foundational framework for her explorations of image processing technologies. As the machines upgrade, the Angel finds herself caught in the ripple of their distortions, unable to render the world around her.
Complementing her practice, she published Glitch Moment/um (INC, 2011), a book on the exploitation and popularization of glitch artifacts. She further explored the politics of image processing in Beyond Resolution (i.R.D., 2020). In this book, Rosa describes how the standardization of resolutions promotes efficiency, order, and functionality, but also involves compromises, resulting in the obfuscation of alternative ways of rendering.

@_menkman

beyondresolution.info/

Bild: © Rosa Menkman

From Systems to Symmetries: Generative Imaging Practices in the Work of Ernest Edmonds and Manfred Mohr

This paper reflects on the historical development and contemporary evolution of generative imaging processes through the lens of two pioneers: Ernest Edmonds and Manfred Mohr. Informed by the conceptual legacy of Max Bense’s generative aesthetics, both artists developed rule-based visual systems in the late 1960s and early 1970s that radically expanded the boundaries of visual language.

Drawing on material from my book Generative Systems Art: The Work of Ernest Edmonds (Routledge, 2017), I will discuss Edmonds‘ sustained exploration of interactivity, systems thinking, and networked co-presence in works such as Cities Tango 2025: Vancouver, London, Milan, a new commission for SIGGRAPH 2025. This real-time, site-connected piece creates an evolving image space through audience interaction across three cities, updating Edmonds’ long-standing engagement with public participation and computational aesthetics.

In parallel, I will examine two algorithmic works by Manfred Mohr—Cubic Limit (1973–74) and Liquid Symmetry (2024)—both featured in the curated exhibition I am organizing for SIGGRAPH 2025.

These works frame Mohr’s practice across five decades—from his pioneering use of custom algorithms to visualise the deconstruction of the cube, to his current explorations of 11-dimensional hypercubes through non-repetitive real-time animation. Both works exemplify the evolution of his approach to generative geometry and algorithmic abstraction.

Through this historical-contemporary dialogue, the paper aims to illuminate how early generative paradigms not only anticipated current AI-based image production, but continue to provide critical frameworks for understanding authorship, abstraction, and meaning in today’s algorithmic visual culture.

Francesca Franco

Francesca Franco, PhD, is an independent curator, art historian and producer based in the UK and Italy. Her research on the history of early computer art and its pioneers has been widely published and translated. Her recent books include Generative Systems Art (Routledge, 2018), The Algorithmic Dimension (Springer, 2022) and Computer Art at the Venice Biennale (Springer, 2025). She is also the editor of The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of New Media Art (2025), Volume 1: History and Theory. Notable curatorial projects include Vera Molnár: Icône 2020 at the 59th Venice Biennale, Algorithmic Signs (Venice, 2017) and Vera Molnár: Variazioni Icône (Rome, 2023). She has commissioned significant new works, such as Molnár’s first glasswork in Murano, Icône 2020 (2021), Roman Verostko’s St Mark’s Apocalypse (2017), Ernest Edmonds’s Growth and Form (2017), Cities Tango 2025: Vancouver, London, Milan (2025) and Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau’s Acqua Ma Non Troppo (2023). Francesca is currently serving as the 2025 SIGGRAPH Art Gallery Chair.

Bild:  Francesca Franco © Marta Buso

Generative Photography, Generative AI: Two Logics of Making

Generative photography, most visibly articulated by Gottfried Jäger, has mostly been celebrated for its elegant lattices, serial permutations and deliberate avoidance of depiction. Yet what truly makes the work generative is not the look of the photographs but the way the photographs are brought into being. Exemplifying what Frieder Nake calls algorithmic thinking, Jäger designed compact, often hand-built cameras that enclosed film, lens, shutter, masking plates and motion mechanisms in fixed relations. Each device embodied a short, finite procedure, an optical-mechanical algorithm, executed repeatedly without further human intervention. Parameters such as aperture, slit width or rotation speed were set at the outset; thereafter the apparatus iterated quasi-autonomously, exposing the film according to its internal programme. Small variances in material tolerance or environment injected a modicum of chance, so every pass yielded a distinct yet recognisably related frame. Generativity here is therefore protocol-driven: it arises from the interaction of a rigid rule set with contingent physical noise. Authorship migrates from the instant of shutter release to the prior design of the rule set itself. Contemporary generative AI enacts generativity through a fundamentally different, statistically oriented chain. Diffusion networks and related models are first trained on vast corpora of tagged images; training compresses that data into high-dimensional latent spaces encoding learnt visual regularities. At synthesis time, a text prompt or conditioning image steers a stochastic sampling process: the model iteratively removes noise, guided by probability distributions inferred during its training. Each step is computational, not mechanical, and the outcome space is combinatorically immense, bounded chiefly by the training data and the random seed. Generativity here is probabilistic: new images surface as statistically plausible recombinations of latent features rather than as material variants generated by a fixed hardware protocol. Unlike earlier algorithmic thinking, bold and conscious, herein internal operations are default and remain largely opaque (even to their creators) and do not proceed through explicit, humanly-readable algorithms. Juxtaposing these two regimes sharpens what is at stake in the term generative. Jäger’s cameras operate within a closed system whose parameters are transparent, enumerable and reproducible; the artist’s intellectual labour lies in crafting the device and accepting the aleatory surprises it yields. Generative AI, by contrast, functions in an open statistical field whose inner weights are hidden and whose outputs reflect the distributional biases of its source corpus. Whereas Jäger’s photographs document the performance of a tangible apparatus, AI images record the state of a mutating model and the social image economy that feeds it. By analysing Jäger’s unpublished sketches, wiring diagrams and exposure logs alongside the computational graphs of contemporary diffusion models, this project will map the shift from protocol-driven to probabilistic generativity. In doing so, it repositions generative photography as a crucial historical precedent for—yet philosophically distinct counterpart to—today’s AI image systems: a lineage that reframes authorship, agency and materiality at the threshold where camera mechanics meet predictive computation.

Yanai Toister

Yanai Toister (Ph.D.) is a writer, artist and educator, serving as an associate professor of visual information at the communication sciences unit in Tampere university, Finland. His artworks have been exhibited internationally in venues like the Tel Aviv Museum, Kunsthalle Luzern, and the Venice architecture Biennale. His writings have appeared in journals such as Digital Creativity, Media Theory and Photographies. Toister’s book, Photography from the Turin Shroud to the Turing Machine, is published by Intellect/University of Chicago Press.

Bild: © Yanai Toister, 2024

(Non-)arbitrary images

In just a few years, AI-generated imagery has evolved from a niche technology to mainstream media production, driven by advancements in multimodal AI systems. While Big Tech promotes this as a revolutionary innovation, the reality is more complex.

When developing artistic strategies that treat AI images as a medium in their own right, generative AI cannot be separated from the technological strucutres that define it. It must therefore be understood in relation to its underlying models and tendencies to reinforce standardized visual practices, despite its seemingly arbitrary output.

This talk moves beyond mainstream discourse on generative AI to explore its underlying structural and aesthetic conditions. It questions the ontological and aesthetic properties that characterize AI-generated images within the broader context of visual culture and presents work exploring the materiality of generative images.

Matthias Grund

Matthias Grund (b. 1995) is a Cologne-based artist and designer. In his artistic research, he explores the structural and aesthetic conditions that shape synthetic images and their associated visual cultures. He is a Ph.D. student at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and a research associate at Köln International School of Design, TH Köln. His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Museum für Angewandte Kunst Köln (MAKK), Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe, Kunsthalle Trier, Fundación Ludwig de Cuba, and the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, and has been presented at several academic conferences.

matthiasgrund.com
@matthias_grund

Bild: © Matthias Grund

Sounding Infrastructures

Our engagement with creative processes, from creation to perception, is pro- foundly shaped by an often-invisible yet omnipresent layer of infrastructural elements. The lecture-performance examines the underlying structures that support our creative practice; from the tools we use, the languages we communicate in, to the environments we inhabit. We will explore how these infrastructures influence and contour our creative processes and experiences and propose to ask questions that might help us to better understand their role in our practices.

Till Bovermann

Till Bovermann aka LFSaw is a Berlin-based sound artist and scientist, working with field recording and interactive sound programming, creating sonic experiences and hypothetical islands of immersion and reflection.

As professor for Sound Art at HMTM München, he teaches creative coding, sound art and artistic research. Till is co-founder of the company plonk and part of the artist collectives friendly.organisms and wait and hear. Alongside his artistic and academic work, Till develops software in and for SuperCollider, Python, and Faust.

https://tai-studio.org/
http://friendly.organisms.de
http://plonk.studio

Bild: © Till Bovermann, 2024

Over, Under and In Post-Photographic Images

Gezeigt werden Werke von Nadim Abdalla, Darius Bange, Moritz Boskovski, Ricarda Braunst, Paul Düstersiek, Sarah Ebel, Philip Fröhlich, Miguel Aurelio Gebauer, Levin Geller, Jonas Glanz, Finley Grimmer, Andreas Jon Grote, Kevin Kloss, Marvin Krullmann, André Plümer, Jana Sehnert, Moritz Thömmes, Linda Vollmer, Bernhard Wiethüchter, Finn Wisk, Maira Wissing, Qinyi Yue.

Zum Wandel generativer Ästhetik seit 1965

Max Benses kurzer Essay Projekte generativer Ästhetik erschien 1965 zusammen mit einer Reihe von Computergraphiken des Mathematikers und Programmierers Georg Nees in der Buchreihe rot.
Aus der algorithmischen Verbindung von geoemtrischen Zeichenanweisungen mit arithmetischen Zufallszahlenfolgen waren damals Formen auf der Grenze von Ordnung und Unordnung entstanden. Sie konnten in Begriffen einer Informationsästhetik beschrieben werden, wie Bense und andere sie in jenen Jahren vorgelegt hatten. Ähnlich wie im Fall der frühen kybernetischen Maschinen von William Grey Walter und Norbert Wiener / Henry Singleton waren die zugrunde liegenden technischen Lösungen sehr einfach, wiesen aber eine überraschende Variationsbreite in ihrem ‚Verhalten‘ auf. Sie können somit auch in das Gebiet der frühen KI-Experimente eingeordnet werden. Der Vortrag wendet sich zunächst diesen historischen Zusammenhängen zu, um dann von dort aus auf die Wiederkehr des Generativen (in Bild und Text) in der Gegenwart zu schauen. Dabei soll nachverfolgt werden, wie das, was einstmals eine marginale ästhetische Praxis in wissenschaftlichen Rechenzentren war, zur Grundlage einer globalen Industrialisierung sprachlicher und kultureller Formen werden konnte. Zugleich wird die Frage aufgeworfen, was dieser technische Stand für die gestalterische Praxis bedeutet.

Hans-Christian von Herrmann

Hans-Christian von Herrmann leitet das Fachgebiet Literaturwissenschaft mit dem Schwerpunkt Literatur und Wissenschaft an der TU Berlin. Er forscht und lehrt zum Wandel der literarischen Kultur im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert sowie zur Wissens- und Kulturgeschichte von Kybernetik und Künstlicher Intelligenz.

tu.berlin/literaturwissen

Bild: © Hans-Christian von Herrmann

Synthetic Memories: AI, Photography and the Mediality of Absence

Today, the market for AI tools is saturated with applications designed to manage “absence.” This absence can take many forms: loss, death, heartbreak, separation, or simply longing for companionship. AI apps promise to bridge these emotional gaps. By using photos, chats, videos, and other types of personal data, users can synthesize the presence of absent individuals across various media, extending conversations or fabricating memories. These apps position AI as a form of surrogate media and even as Bachelor machines. Artistic projects intervene in this field, prompting reflection on cultural practices and the evolving role of AI. In my talk, I will focus on artistic works that explore the relationship between photography, AI, and memory—as a mediated and embodied way of engaging with an absent past.
In many theories of photography, the medium is considered a privileged mnemotechnology—a technology of memory (e.g., Santayana 1905; Kracauer 1929; Barthes 1989; Derrida 2001). Photography captures past events, making them available for remembrance and retrieval. Because it evokes something that is never fully present, photography has a hauntological structure and temporality; photos function as ghostly traces of the past. But what happens when AI-generated synthetic photos depict a past that never occurred? What if synthetic photography creates memories that were never experienced or lived? This question is explored in art projects such as One Last Journey (Alexey Chernikov, 2023), Silent Hero (Alexey Yurenev, ongoing since 2019), and N.N. (Max Kreis, 2025). Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology (1993), I will examine contemporary art projects that use AI to synthesize photographic memories. As I will argue, AI-generated images intensify the spectral quality of photography: they resemble memories, but refer to no actual past. By amplifying photography’s ghostly mediality, these works question the traditional connections between memory and photography, but also between memory and affect.

Olga Moskatova

Olga Moskatova is Professor for Media Studies at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany. Her main research fields include theory and aesthetics of visual media, materiality of media, protective media, and networked images. Selected publications*: Male am Zelluloid: Zum relationalen Materialismus im kameralosen Film* (transcript 2019); Images on the Move: Materiality—Networks—Formats (transcript 2021); Networked Images in Surveillance Capitalism (special issue of Digital Culture & Society 2021, co-edited with Anna Polze and Ramon Reichert); Video Conferencing: Practices, Politics, Aesthetics (transcript 2023, co-edited with Jan Distelmeyer and Axel Volmar).

Bild: © Olga Moskatova, 2025

Die Rolle der Autorinnen*

Ausgehend von der Frage, ob und bis zu welchem Ausmaß generative Praktiken – wie sie von Künstler:innen verwendet werden – als generativ gelten können, möchte ich die damit verschränkte Rolle der Autor:innenschaft in den Fokus nehmen und sie anhand ausgewählter Beispiele analysieren. Welche Vorgehensweisen sind ‚methodisch‘ genug, damit man von generierten Bildern sprechen kann? Wie ist das Verhältnis von Apparat und Künstler:in? Wie inhaltlich ‚neutral‘ müssen generierte Bilder sein, oder anders gefragt: welchen Anteil darf die eigene Person bzw. die Biografie haben? Kurz: Wo und auf welche Weise wird die Autor:innenschaft in generativen Bildern sichtbar und – Max Benses Erzeugungsästhetik weiterdenkend – welche Rolle spielt die Materialität der Bilder, ihre Dimension und Inszenierung?
Denn wesentlicher Teil eines künstlerischen Werks ist das Experimentieren mit der Form, und entsprechend groß sind der zeitliche, finanzielle und handwerkliche Aufwand (auch wenn er ausgelagert wird). Es werden etwa Apparate (um)gebaut, um (originale) Werke zu schaffen, die von keiner öffentlich kursierenden Maschine hergestellt werden können. Die Bestimmung der Form gilt umso mehr für postfotografische Bilder, sobald sie nicht nur für einen Monitor konzipiert sind. Solange wir von realen Ausstellungsräumen ausgehen, in welchen Werke sinnlich erfahrbar sind, ist die Ausführung, die ein Bild zu einem physischen Objekt macht, um mit seinem Publikum in eine Beziehung zu treten, zentral.
Interessant wird es auch, wenn Autor:innen den eigenen Körper einbringen: Aspekte des Apparativen werden dann mit Aspekten des Menschlichen ‚gemessen‘ und die jeweiligen Normen einander gegenübergestellt (z.B. Richard Kriesches Satellitenfest und Konrad Strutz‘ Acheiropoietron). Auch bei KI-generierten Bildern sind mir zutiefst biografisch motivierte Motive aufgefallen, die die generative Produktion ganz maßgeblich mit ihren Autor:innen verschränken. Und wenn Julian Palacz eine leere Photoshop-Seite als binären Code ausgibt, wird klar, dass wir die Sprache der Maschine nicht lesen können, sondern ein abstraktes Muster wahrnehmen. Sämtliche Ergebnisse von informationsverarbeitenden Systemen müssen immer in für uns verständliche Bilder, Zahlen, Diagramme u.ä. umgewandelt werden. Das Maß ist letztlich der Mensch.

Ruth Horak (AUSTRIA)

Mag. Ruth Horak ist Kunsthistorikerin, Autorin und Kuratorin. Besonders über den künstlerisch-experimentellen Umgang mit den Bedingungen und Eigenschaften der Fotografie, über das Analoge als Motiv, die Materialität der Fotografie und die Fototechnik aus einer weiblichen Perspektive hat sie seit den 2000er Jahren vielfach publiziert und kuratiert, u.a. FOTOTECHNIKA (2023), Fotografie als Motiv (2021), Reload The Apparatus (2018), sowie Anfang der 2000er über Fotografie und Abstraktion: Rethinking Photography – Narration und neue Reduktion in der Fotografie (2003) und Image:/images – On Contemporary Photography (2002). In der Lehre verknüpft sie die Geschichte und Theorie der Fotografie mit konzeptuellen künstlerischen Arbeiten. Durch die enge Zusammenarbeit mit Künstler:innen stellt das Making-of einen wichtigen Ansatz in ihren Texten und Ausstellungen dar.

photography-she-said.com

Brain Twister. Gottfried Jägers Fotomaterialarbeiten zwischen Medienphilosophie, Performance und Denkspiel.

Gottfried Jägers Fotomaterialarbeiten sind weit mehr als nur ein Verweis auf das verwendete Medium – sie sind eine radikale Hommage an das fotografische Material selbst. Was zunächst simpel erscheint, offenbart sich als vielschichtiges Konzept, das mit jeder Arbeit eine neue Wendung nimmt. Die Werke fordern nicht nur das Auge, sondern auch den Verstand – oft erschließen sie sich erst im performativen Akt des Künstlers in ihrer ganzen Tiefe.
Der Vortrag beleuchtet die historischen wie aktuellen Bedeutungsebenen dieser Werkreihe im vielgestaltigen Œuvre Gottfried Jägers. Dabei wird ihr Potenzial für eine medienreflexive Auseinandersetzung mit der Fotografie herausgearbeitet – eine Spurensuche an den Rändern des Fotografischen.

Franziska Kunze

Dr. Franziska Kunze (*1984 Rostock, DDR) leitet die Sammlung Fotografie und Zeitbasierte Medien an der Pinakothek der Moderne. Zu den von ihr kuratierten Ausstellungen gehören Glitch. Die Kunst der Störung (2023) und On View. Begegnungen mit dem Fotografischen (co-kuratiert 2025). 2019/20 verantwortete sie die Abteilung Gegenwartskunst am LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur in Münster und war von 2017 bis 2019 Stipendiatin im Programm Museumskurator:innen für Fotografie der Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung. Sie übernimmt Lehraufträge, verfasst Texte und engagiert sich in verschiedenen Fachjurys zur Fotografie.

Dr Franziska Kunze (*1984 Rostock, Germany) is chief curator of photography and time-based media at the Bavarian State Painting Collections | Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. The exhibitions she has curated include Glitch. The Art of Interference (2023) and On View. Encounters with the Photographic (co-curated in 2025). Before, she was vicariously responsible for the Contemporary Art Department at the LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur in Münster and was from 2017 to 2019 a fellow in the programme Museum Curators for Photography of the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation. Franziska takes on teaching assignments, writes texts and is involved in various expert juries on photography.

@franziska__kunze

Bild: © Elisabeth Greil

Artist Talk mit Moderation von Ruth Horak, Jana Sehnert

Für ein abschließendes Künstlergespräch werden zwei Pioniere der Generativen Ästhetik Prof. em. Gottfried Jäger (Begründer der Generativen Fotografie) und Prof. em. Frieder Nake (Pionier der Computerkunst) auf das Podium geladen. Während mit der Ausrichtung des 1. Bielefelder Postfotosymposiums auf eine bestehende Forschungstradition der von Gottfried Jäger etablierten Fotosymposien zurückgegriffen wird, hat die HSBI mit der Besetzung von Professur für Generative Bildsysteme mit Prof. Adrian Sauer die Spielarten Generativer Ästhetik erneut auf den Lehrplan gebracht.

Unter der Moderation von Dr. Ruth Horak (Kuratorin und Publizistin, u.a. zu konzeptueller zeitgenössischer Kunst und Abstraktion in Fotografie) und der Masterstudentin Jana Sehnert wird eingeladen gemeinsam mit den Künstlern den begriffsgeschichtlichen Wandel des Generativen, sowie seine technologischen und materiellen Einbettungen, zu reflektieren und diskutieren.

Gottfried Jäger, Frieder Nake, Adrian Sauer

Gottfried Jäger (geboren 1937 in Burg bei Magdeburg), begann nach klassischer Lehre im Fotohandwerk und seinem Studium an der Staatl. Höheren Fachschule für Photographie in Köln 1960 seine Lehrtätigkeit an der Werkkunstschule Bielefeld (heute Hochschule Bielefeld). 1973 wurde er hier zum Professor für Künstlerische Grundlagen der Fotografie und Generative Bildsysteme berufen. Bis zu seiner Emeritierung im Jahr 2003 hat er die künstlerische Praxis und den medientheoretischen Diskurs an der Bielefelder Hochschule vorangetrieben und mit den Bielefelder Fotosymposien maßgeblich geprägt.

 2011 promovierte er an der Universität Bielefeld zum Thema Mikrofotografie als Obsession. Das fotografische Werk von Carl Strüwe (1898-1989).

Als Künstler hat er an diskursbildenden Gruppenausstellungen zur Generativen Fotografie und Ästhetik teilgenommen und dazu zahlreiche Publikationen veröffentlicht. Für sein Werk wurde er 1992 mit der George-Eastman-Medaille der Deutschen Fotografischen Akademie (DFA) und 1996 mit der David-Octavius-Hill-Medaille der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Photographie (DGPh) geehrt.

gottfried-jaeger.de
concrete-photography.com

Bild: © Ursel Jäger, 2023