Short Abstract

Visual culture is increasingly machine-centric: images interpreted, classified, and created by machines. This panel examines how computer vision and AI image generation create, reproduce, and reinforce socio-political polarizations, urging Visual Anthropology to critically engage with them.

Long Abstract

Over the past decade, a fundamental transformation of visual cultures, and especially of human-machine-image entanglements, has occurred. They are more and more shaped by algorithms and neural networks. Digital images are no longer just seen; they are indexed and operationalized by machines through rigid classifications that often reflect and reinforce existing power structures. At the same time, synthetic AI-generated images circulate with unprecedented speed and scale, amplifying misinformation and reconfiguring visual authority in political and social life.

This panel explores how machine vision systems—encompassing both computer vision (recognition, classification) and generative AI (synthesis, creation, imagination)—constitute an integrated regime that is reshaping visual culture and intensifies polarization. Machine vision creates technical polarizations: computer vision fragments images into features, edges, and keypoints—decomposing unified visual fields into computational data structures. Further, it amplifies socio-political polarizations, embedding biases and asymmetries of visibility within algorithmic infrastructures.

This panel aims to reflect on the digital, material and socio-political dimensions of AI vision systems: How have human-machine-image entanglements altered? How can anthropology propose critical perspectives on computer vision and image-generation tools beyond techno-positivism and techno-determinism? How might researchers reject, subvert, or strategically deploy such tools in fieldwork and analysis? And how can interdisciplinary collaboration between Visual Anthropology, Media Studies, and Science and Technology Studies expand these debates?

By convening scholars and practitioners across these fields, this panel asks how visual anthropology can critically engage with these transformation – rethinking documentation, representation, and the politics of seeing and creating images in an era when the analysis and production of visuals are becoming post-human.

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