Algorithms play an increasingly influential role in the production, circulation, and interpretation of images, a shift that has complex implications for art, the humanities, and visual culture.

After crossing paths with gnration in 2022 for the Órbita programme cycle, Rosemary Lee returns to Braga to present her book Algorithm, Image, Art (2024), which examines the history, processes, and ideas behind current visual culture. Machine learning algorithms now have a pervasive influence on the aesthetics and meaning of images. But while novel in some aspects, these recent developments are connected to much earlier, even analog, geometrical, optical, and procedural methods.

This book looks at how the production of images in terms of algorithmic instructions has shaped images and art, as well as the values used to assess them. It draws connections between the algorithmic forms of visual media we are familiar with today and the precursors from which they evolved.

The book presentation will take place at gnration (sala multiusos) on 12 October at 16:30. Admission is free. The session is organised in partnership with Braga Media Arts.

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Rosemary Lee is an artist and media researcher. Her work considers how image production technologies fit within larger narratives about art, knowledge, and relations between humans and machines. Informed by the perspective of media archaeology, Rosemary Lee seeks to develop a better understanding of how current methods and ideas are influenced by those of the past.

Specialising in the impact of artificial intelligence on visual culture, Lee completed her PhD at IT-University of Copenhagen in 2020 with a thesis entitled Machine Learning and Notions of the Image. Rosemary Lee teaches in the Multimedia programme at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto and is currently an artist in residence with the European Media Art Platform hosted by NeMe in Limassol, Cyprus.