Viral Hallucinations Symposium #2: Politics of Presence—Bodies Under Algorithmic Conditions

The second symposium in the “Viral Hallucinations” series examines the transformative impact of digital technologies, algorithmic gaze, and social media on how we perceive bodies—our own and those of others. Bringing together artists, researchers, and curatorial perspectives that explore the politics of presence—both physical and online—the symposium analyzes how tensions and frictions are negotiated between human, embodied seeing and machine vision.

How do the visual worlds of body images, imaginaries of hybrid selves, and political conflicts that unfold online reshape our sense of self, our presence in public spaces, and the ways in which we navigate and inhabit them with others? In which ways do the implicit or explicit forces of surveillance, censorship, othering, and rituals of judgment influence how we navigate networked body images? 

Lectures and performances
Art historian and curator Dr. Jana Johanna Haeckel’s lecture explores the imaginative and reparative potential of AI-generated images in art, focusing on artistic positions that use synthetic image technologies to address the gaps in migrant and diasporic experiences within existing material and virtual image archives. 

Artist Sheung Yiu’s performative desktop lecture delves into the interpretation of real-time facial recognition, juxtaposing Chinese face reading practices with contemporary technology to reveal the unstable and unpredictable nature of these interpretations. 

Marco De Mutiis, co-curator of The Lure of the Image at Fotomuseum Winterthur, explores how algorithmic and networked images generate affect and transform attention. His lecture explores the intense experiences emerging from an interdependent system that fuses software, technical infrastructures, affective attachments, and emotional responses. 

The examination of the role of photographic testimony in networked image spaces will drive the presentation of artist Jonas Hoeschl, who focuses on how bodies become politically charged through visual documentation, public circulation, and digital coding. 

Dr. Annekathrin Kohout, author and cultural scientist, addresses how social media platforms fragment and ritualize presence through affective reactions, algorithmic connectivity, and visual fragmentation, making visibility a performative duty that accumulates affective capital. 

The symposium’s final lecture is presented by artist Laia Abril. Examining the systems of control, violence, and invisibilization imposed on women, her seminal multichapter project “A History of Misogyny” focuses on the mutating roles of image making in biopolitics and the ethics of representation.

Bodies Under Algorithmic Conditions: World-Building Workshop
How do narrative and algorithmic tactics, along with networked imagery, reshape the relationships to bodies and between bodies? What potential lies in counter-narrative artistic appropriations of these tactics and body mythologies?

The two-day workshop invites participants and invited experts to explore the profound ways of how digital technologies shape our perception of bodies through an ecosystemic world-building methodology. Participants will investigate topics of agency, visibility, hybrid identities, and the complexities of embodied presence in the digital age. Hence, the workshop aims to appropriate these techniques to navigate a regime of algorithmic visibility and craft counter-narratives. 

The workshop will be led by Juan Diaz Bohorquez, the European Director of the World Building Institute Berlin/Los Angeles. He has developed narrative design- and world-building methodologies for the past two decades, which have been applied across films and media, social impact projects, and science-art collaborations.

The free two-day workshop is aimed at artists, photographers, writers, journalists, students, designers, and researchers. Please send a half-page motivational note to apply.

The symposium and workshop are part of the “Viral Hallucinations” series conceived by Nadine Isabelle Henrich.

The event is kindly supported by ZEIT STIFTUNG BUCERIUS.