Are Some Things (Still) Unrepresentable?

Fabian Offewrt and Thao Phan participate in a workshop on the Cultural Political of the Computational Image—and an era-spanning conversation with Ranciére by way of Galloway

Global Mediations Lab, MIT

Cultural Politics of the Computational Image

Workshop webpage

Fabian Offert

Computational images Representation AI Data visualisation

Workshop abstract

“Are some things unrepresentable?” asks a 2011 essay by Alexander Galloway. It responds to a similarly titled, earlier text by the philosopher Jacques Ranciére examining the impossibility of representing political violence, with the Shoa as its anchor point. How, or how much political violence, asks Ranciére, can be represented? What visual modes, asks Galloway, can be used to represent the unrepresentable? In this talk, we examine two contemporary artistic projects that deal with this problem of (visual) representation in the age of artificial intelligence.
Exhibit.ai, the first project, was conceived by the prominent Australian law firm Maurice Blackburn and focuses on the experiences of asylum seekers incarcerated in one of Australia’s infamous “offshore processing” centers. It attempts to bring ‘justice through synthesis’, to mitigate forms of political erasure by generating an artificial record using AI imagery. Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Power and Technology, 1500-2025, the second project, is a “large-scale research visualization exploring the historical and political dependence of AI on systems of exploitation in the form of a room-sized flow chart.
On the surface, the two projects could not be more unlike: the first using AI image generators to create photorealistic depictions of political violence as a form of nonhuman witnessing, the second using more-or-less traditional forms of data visualization and information aesthetics to render visible the socio-technical ‘underbelly’ of artificial intelligence. And yet, as we argue, both projects construct a highly questionable representational politics of artificial intelligence, where a tool which itself is unrepresentable for technical reasons becomes an engine of ethical and political representation. While images are today said to be “operational”, meaning that they no longer function as primarily indexical objects, AI images (arguably the most operational image) are now asked to do the representational (and profoundly political) work of exposing regimes of power, exploitation, and violence.