Realities and Representations
Counter-Images of the Alps - Visual Activism Against the Spectacle-Driven Exploitation of Italian Alpine Landscapes: Photography and Transmedia Research as a Democratic Tool of Information and Resistance
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Beatrice Citterio
The upcoming Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics present a complex intersection of ecological and cultural concerns, particularly concerning the accelerated development and infrastructural expansion accompanying such mega-events. In addition, they fit into, exploit and promote a winter tourism system that is now unsustainable and against which numerous local civic groups seek to take sides despite tremendous administrative and financial pressure. The proposed study critically engages with the ramifications of this spectacle, focusing on how grassroots activism—with and through also visual mediums such as photography—tries to oppose the ongoing exploitation of alpine landscapes and resources. In its pursuit of infrastructural progress, the accelerated development associated with the event raises significant concerns regarding the erasure of local heritage and environmental degradation, participating—as said—in a widely problematic development model. By situating this photographic and visual research practice within Ordinary Practice and Collective Behaviors, the paper explores how everyday visual material—collected during participated field research—can become acts of collective resistance, addressing global challenges such as profit-driven exploitation, mega-events, and cultural preservation, while also challenging corporate-driven narratives of green-washed sustainability. In this context, photography transcends its role as mere documentation, emerging as a democratic tool that reshapes the public and main discourses and informs and mobilises transregional civic groups. Through this lens, the study positions visual media not only as a vehicle for resistance but as a pivotal element of alternative, participatory knowledge production.
Poem, Painting, Sculpture: Text and Art in Nomad Space
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Shakir Mustafa
The paper investigates artworks like paintings and sculptures that engage literary works through creating parallel works. It explores the notion of melting boundaries as demonstrated by Dia Azzawi’s poetry livres d’artiste that produce parallel works, or paintings and sculptures inspired by poems. The discussion will center on Azzawi’s 2023 exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford, England. Azzawi demonstrates engagement of literary works in larger personal projects of social and political activism, and in that he consolidates contemporary philosophical and political statements about contemporary artists’ role in contesting objectionable political and social trends. My central argument in this study is that various genres like poems, paintings, and sculptures can be better understood as nomadic texts that relate to one another in unpredictable but revealing manners. Their coming together would be an event in which art and literature inspire each other. It uses Jacques Derrida’s and Erin Manning’s writings on imaginative and creative approaches to art criticism to facilitate recognition of several channels thorough which nomadic works connect. Another key argument asserts the need for meaningful and impactful engagement with cultural issues, and the need to draw attention to what contemporary philosophers have termed the “absence of an emergency.” An inquiry into nomadic acts emphasizes the necessity of surrendering to nomadic impulses in investigating aesthetic experiences. It gauges the depth of what Brian Massumi and Manning call the ecology of experience, and to relearn how to follow nomads in their in-between paths and zones.
AI Style
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Maayan Amir
AI image generators gained widespread public attention in 2022, representing a leap in creating novel visual content through pattern synthesis from massive datasets. As these tools became more widely used, several lawsuits have been filed by creators against AI image-generation companies—including Stability AI, MidJourney, and DeviantArt—alleging copyright infringement. Central to these allegations is the assertion that these AI models can 'mimic the plaintiffs' artistic styles' without authorization, presenting a breach of the venerable ramparts guarding traditional definitions of copying and representation (Andersen v. Stability AI Ltd. 2024,4). These claims center on "style transfer," an emerging deep learning technique introduced in 2015 that enables neural networks to separate image content from style elements and recombine them, applying one image's style to another's content. While media scholars largely viewed the technique as operating within reproduction, aestheticization, and automation, building on the work of scholar Mario Carpo and literary critic N. Katherine Hayles, this paper examines how these copyright claims reveal a deeper philosophical problem: not only the examination of how generative AI resurrects antiquated theories of artistic creation that the creative community deliberately excised from modern discourse on art and design, with abundant justification, but also as an invitation to explore how after two millennia of confining mimesis solely to human domains, we now need to confront its recasting as it is practiced by intelligent systems beyond human cognition—a reconceptualization that will transform existing concepts of originality, authorship, and transformative use through which these copyright disputes are adjudicated.
