From computer graphics to networked images, from computer vision to generative AI, computational systems have started shaping not only our perception of the world but also its operations and fundamental reality. As images shift from representational surfaces to active foundations on top of which global social and political systems are built, how does one make sense of and relate to this image world?
Through a series of talks, video essays, and inputs by invited artists and researchers, this symposium explores the relations between computational images and their effects on the world outside of the screen.
Alan Warburton’s 2020 video essay RGBFAQ traces a recent history of what he terms the hyperimage, drafting a trajectory from computer graphics to synthetic data and examining how images have become increasingly unmoored from photographic indexicality.
Marco De Mutiis introduces the topic of Becoming Image, offering an overview of the different modes in which images have become operational actors – and how digital simulations, game worlds, and computational models affect behaviours, shape subjects, and implement their algorithmic images onto the world.
Sheung Yiu’s video essay It’s a Face-eat-face World investigates how synthetic faces replace the real and transform identities, tracing the cyclical evolution from facial recognition to synthetic facial data through uncanny visuals of digital doubles traversing vast abstract landscapes.
Martyna Marciniak unpacks the complex landscape of synthetic image misinformation, tracing visual mechanisms of manufacturing belief and trust – and considering synthetic images as generators of “deep realities”’ and devices for conjuring hyperstitious, self-fulfilling prophecies.
Felicity Hammond presents her artistic research interrogating the meeting places of geological mining and data mining. Staged across four chapters and ending in a funeral service for artificial intelligence, the work maps how digital material makes its way from mineral to pixel, from the subsurface to the screen.
The program will be conducted in English.
Free entry! Registration required.
CONFERENCE PART #1 @ Katedrala
17:00–19:00
- Alan Warburton: RGBFAQ / screening
- Marco De Mutiis: On Becoming Image / lecture
- Martyna Marciniak: Blobsters, Slop and Hyper-Events: Negotiating Visual Trust in a Post-Optical Era / lecture
- + conversation moderated by Marco De Mutiis and Q&A
CONFERENCE PART #2 @ Katedrala
19:30–21:00
- Sheung Yiu: It’s a Face-eat-face World / screening
- Sheung Yiu: It’s a Face-eat-face World / artist talk
- Felicity Hammond: Variations / lecture
- + conversation moderated by Marco De Mutiis and Q&A
EXHIBITION OPENING @ Kamera
21:00–22:00
Full programme: https://aksioma.org/becomingimage/
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Tactics&practice #17: Becoming Image
Ljubljana, February–June 2026
Organised and produced by:
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2026
In collaboration with:
Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture
ALUO – The Academy of Fine Arts and Design of the University of Ljubljana
For the conference series:
tactics&practice
Supported by:
The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia
The Municipality of Ljubljana
Italian Cultural Institute in Ljubljana
