Augmented Images. New Challenges in the Era of Big Data Algorithms and Digital Environments.

Org. Maria Giulia Dondero (FNRS/ULiège) and Enzo D’Armenio (FNRS/ULiège)
With the collaboration of Ralph Dekoninck (UCL) and Thierry Lenain (ULB)

The evolution of computer algorithms has enabled images to acquire new, fundamental skills in the digital age. In scientific research, artistic creation and the humanistic professions, images have taken on at least three new capacities:
1) First of all, analytical skills: visualisation techniques have always been a fundamental persuasive and cognitive tool, starting with the exploitation of visual statistics to make political decisions, and ending with imaging techniques in the field of medical practices and scientific research. The coupling of computer algorithms and languages of images has opened the way to visualisations that qualify themselves as true visual analyses, due to the way they divide, regroup, and highlight patterns starting from massive corpora of data. These analytical capabilities are having a greater impact in all areas of society, starting with the elaboration of a digital art history, and more generally in the field of digital humanities and social practices.
2) Secondly, the refinement of computer algorithms, in combination with technological apparatuses such as virtual reality, give images an unprecedented immersive power, transforming them into manipulable and sensorially dense environment-images. There are countless applications in the fields of entertainment, architecture, heritage practices, psychology, and even education, being implemented. Projects such as the Europe Time Machine and Facebook’s investment in its Social Metaverse company demonstrate the centrality that visual immersion technologies are assuming in the digital society.
3) Finally, digital images are carriers of new socialising skills. The combination of portable technologies (smartphones first and foremost), social networks and their algorithms are welding the construction and transformation of identity of individuals and institutions in unprecedented ways. Phenomena such as face recognition in police investigations, as well as legitimate and illegal deepfakes testify to the wide impact on identities within different social practices.
The “Augmented Images” symposium aims to build a critical overview of these three new skills of visualizations and of images: analytical, immersive and socialising, welcoming researchers working in scientific fields such as Art History, Cognitive Sciences, Epistemology, Semiotics, Computer Vision. The aim of the symposium is twofold: on the one hand to nourish a general examination of the cognitive, analytical and experiential capacities of the visual; on the other hand, to welcome local in-depth analyses of the perspectives opened up by the encounter between images and algorithms.

PROGRAM

Salle Wittert, October 6, 2022

9:00-9:30 Opening Address by Anne-Sophie Nyssen, the President of the University of Liège

9:30-10:00 Maria Giulia Dondero (FNRS/ULiège) & Enzo D’Armenio (FNRS/ULiège) Introduction

Chairs of the session: Maria Giulia Dondero (FNRS/ULiège) and Enzo D’Armenio (FNRS/ULiège)

10:00-10:45 Lev Manovich (City University of New York) What Computers Can and Cannot See?
New Opportunities and New Challenges for Visual Culture Analytics

10:45-11:30 Virginia Kuhn (University of Southern California) The Gesture and the Archive: Sacred Poses and Computer Vision

11:30-12:15 Massimo Leone (University of Turin/University of Shanghai/Fondazione Bruno Kessler) The Augmented Face: Digital Mask or Digital Veil?

Chairman of the session: Ralph Dekoninck (UCL)

14:30-15:15 Yannis Skarpelos (Panteion University Athens) Modeling Plastic Signs in Big Visual Corpora

15:15-16:00 Bruno Bachimont (University of Technology Compiègne) How Can Augmented Images Meet the Variability of Representation of Reality? Repeated Computations versus Aesthetic Creativity

16:00-16:30 Break

16:30-17:15 Antonin Descampe (UCL) Machine Learning Methods to Detect Subjectivity in the News Press: Towards a Multimodal Approach based on Text and Images

17:15-18:00 Houda Lamqaddam (ULiège) Steps Towards a Grammar of Forms in Visual Arts as input for Computer Vision Algorithms

18:00 End of symposium day 1 

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Salle de l’Horloge, October 7, 2022

Chairman of the session: Thierry Lenain (ULB)

9:30-10:15 Johanna Drucker (University of California Los Angeles) Images after Optics: Augmentation Technologies beyond the Visible Spectrum

10:15-11:00 Andrea Pinotti (University Statale de Milan) Immersion/Emersion: On a Polarity in Digital Environments

11:00-11:30 Break

11:30-12:15 Claudio Paolucci (University of Bologna) Prosthesis and Simulacra: A Semiotic Perspective on Virtual and Augmented Reality

Chairwoman of the session: Virginia Kuhn (USC)

14:30-15:15 Stephan Günzel (University of Europe for Applied Sciences) Augmented Identity. Introduction to a New Field in Media Studies

15:15-16:00 Sofia Pirandello (University Statale de Milan) Imagin-action. Augmented Reality Feedback on Human Imagination

16:00-16:45 Lia Yoka (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) More Art Historical Precedents to the Analysis of Big Visual Data

17:00 End of symposium day 2. Final remarks.