Weltfreie Bilder. Digitale Fäden zwischen Mona Lisa und Zitronen

If you want to see the Mona Lisa today, you mainly see smartphones. The focus is not on the painting itself, but on the proof of having been there. In his book #MonaLisa (2024), Christian Welzbacher shows that the smartphone has come between the Mona Lisa and the viewer, between the world and people.

At the same time, millions and millions of digital images are being created online - including immaculately lit lemons that have never been picked and are available to download as renderings. Jacob Birken calls this "pixel realism": an aesthetic in which the aura of reality is no longer attached to the object, but to the effect of the image. What looks like a photograph is considered true - even if it has never seen a camera.

On October 22, Jacob Birken and Christian Welzbacher will meet with Anja Schürmann (KWI) for a discussion about photography between art history and digital culture.

What's happening is realism as an artistic process - and as a problem: What does it mean when AI image generators deliver personalized images that no longer refer to a common reality, but only to individual desires? To what extent does framing - from selfie sticks to mid-journey prompts - shape the way we see? What logics of value and exploitation do the culture industry and platform capitalism share?

The evening combines art historical perspectives with current debates on digitalization, cultural industries and the future of images and invites us to recalibrate our own perception of images.