Conference | Seeing Otherwise: Repoliticizing Algorithmic Vision

the Master's program in Visual Communication in collaboration with Goethe-Institute Israel’s residency program in Jerusalem invites to the international conference: Seeing Otherwise: Repoliticizing Algorithmic Vision.

As algorithmic systems increasingly determine vision and interpretation, the capacity to see otherwise becomes an urgent form of agency and resistance. Can design practices and critical visualization challenge algorithmic regimes of visibility? How might we craft counter-visions that reclaim the right to see, interpret, and reimagine our visual world?

The event will include talks by Prof. Anat Ben David, Robin Coenen and Dr. Mira Anneli Naß, followed by a conversation moderated by Dr. Hagit Keysar.

The event will be conducted in English.

Wendsday | December 10, 2025 - Further information below
The Center for Contemporary Art
2 Tsadok Hacohen St., Tel Aviv-Yafo

Mira Anneli Naß (Frankfurt University, Hebrew University)
Operational Images
Since the early 2000s, artists and scholars have focused on apparatus-based images emerging from military, industrial, and scientific contexts—recordings from surveillance systems, facial recognition imagery, strategic maps, 3D simulations, or forensic and algorithmic visualization processes. For these image forms, the term “operational images” (Harun Farocki) has become established. This talk presents the concept of the operational image, which has gained remarkable traction as an analytical category, and examines artistic practices that appropriate operational images primarily as a means to critique state surveillance and economic control mechanisms.

Anat Ben-David (Open University Israel)
Counter-Visions: The Right to See Otherwise
As artificial intelligence systems increasingly classify, caption, and circulate images, they shape not only what is seen but how meaning itself is produced. This lecture explores the emergence of counter-visions, acts of resistance that reclaim interpretation from algorithmic regimes of visibility. Through examples from climate imagery and platform infrastructures, it traces how human and collective interventions open space for alternative readings, expose what remains unseen, and restore ethical and political depth to data. In doing so, the lecture argues for the right to see otherwise: the collective capacity to question, reinterpret, and repoliticize the visual world shaped by AI. 

Robin Coenen (UDK)
»Design Power(s) Knowledge«  - Prototypes as a Tool for Dialog and Transformation
In his talk, Information designer Robin Coenen explores how design operates not merely as a representational medium, but as a generative mode of inquiry — a way of thinking through making. Drawing from projects developed within his practice Visual Intelligence, he demonstrates how critical visualization, civic technology, and cartographic methods operate as prototyping processes which can produce new, situated forms of knowledge. The talk proposes that information design’s power to create new knowledge lies in its capacity to sense, structure, and reconfigure the relations between data, people, and infrastructures.

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