The Opticality Unconscious

Lecture by Amanda Wasielewski

Tue May 28, 2024, 7pm, Room E.O2.29, Neubau, AdBK München

Inspired by Rosalind Krauss’s book The Optical Unconscious, Amanda Wasielewskis lec­ture explores how a hybrid prac­tice of writ­ing and image cre­ation can shed light on the often-derid­ed stric­tures of mid-cen­tu­ry mod­ernism in New York, name­ly the ideas of opti­cal­i­ty and visu­al auton­o­my.

The lec­ture inves­ti­gates the rela­tion­ships between Modernist key fig­ures such as Krauss and seeks to gen­er­ate “new” images that elu­ci­date these the­o­ret­i­cal per­spec­tives. Wasielewski uses both AI image and text gen­er­a­tion tech­niques as a means not only of exe­cut­ing the project but also as tools of knowl­edge cre­ation. Can AI meth­ods refresh, renew, or oth­er­wise add new insights to art the­o­ry of the past? 

Bio

Amanda Wasielewski is Associate Senior Lecturer of Digital Humanities and Associate Professor of Art History at Uppsala University. Her recent research focus­es on the use of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence tech­niques to study and cre­ate art, with a par­tic­u­lar focus on the the­o­ret­i­cal impli­ca­tions of AI-gen­er­at­ed images. Wasielewski has exhib­it­ed her art­work inter­na­tion­al­ly and is the author of three mono­graphs includ­ing Computational Formalism: Art History and Machine Learning (MIT Press, 2023).

Photo (c) Amanda Wasielewski