How can one ‘see’ the operationalization of contemporary visual culture, given the imperceptibility and apparent automation of so many processes and dimensions of visuality? Seeing – as a position from a singular mode of observation – has become problematic since many visual elements, techniques, and forms of observing are highly distributed through data practices of collection, analysis and prediction. Such practices are subtended by visual cultural techniques that are grounded in the development of image collections, image formatting and hardware design. In this article, we analyze recent transformations in forms of prediction and data analytics associated with spectacular performances of computation. We analyze how transformations in the collection and accumulation of images as ensembles by platforms have a qualitative and material effect on the emergent sociotechnicality of platform ‘life’ and ‘perception’. Reconstructing the visual transformations that allow artificial intelligence assemblages to operate allows some sense of their heteronomous materiality and contingency.

In an ongoing research project on the ascendancy of statistical visual forms, we have been concerned with the transformations wrought by such images and their organisation as datasets in ‘re-drawing’ knowledge about empirical phenomena. Historians and science studies researchers have long established the generative rather than simply illustrative role of images and figures within scientific practice. More recently, the deployment and generation of images by scientific research and its communication via publication has been impacted by the tools, techniques, and practices of working with large (image) datasets. Against this background, we built a dataset of 10 million-plus images drawn from all preprint articles deposited in the open access repository arXiv from 1991 (its inception) until the end of 2018. In this article, we suggest ways – including algorithms drawn from machine learning that facilitate visually ’slicing’ through the image data and metadata – for exploring large datasets of statistical scientific images. By treating all forms of visual material found in scientific publications – whether diagrams, photographs, or instrument data – as bare images, we developed methods for tracking their movements across a range of scientific research. We suggest that such methods allow us different entry points into large scientific image datasets and that they initiate a new set of questions about how scientific representation might be operating at more-than-human scale.

This article focuses on signal as an aspect of modern technicity that precedes—or supersedes—codification. Examining DIY drone videos found on YouTube and the video art of Nam June Paik, among other sources, the article explores how each tests the flow of signal and signal processing as forms of transmateriality and transduction. the author draws particularly on the work of Gilbert Simondon and Adrian Mackenzie.

The experience of networks as the immediate sensing of relations between humans and nonhuman technical elements in assemblages such as viral media and databases. Today almost every aspect of life for which data exists can be rendered as a network. Financial data, social networks, biological ecologies: all are visualized in links and nodes, lines connecting dots. A network visualization of a corporate infrastructure could look remarkably similar to that of a terrorist organization. In An Aesthesia of Networks, Anna Munster argues that this uniformity has flattened our experience of networks as active and relational processes and assemblages. She counters the “network anaesthesia” that results from this pervasive mimesis by reinserting the question of experience, or aesthesia, into networked culture and aesthetics. Rather than asking how humans experience computers and networks, Munster asks how networks experience—what operations they perform and undergo to change and produce new forms of experience. Drawing on William James's radical empiricism, she asserts that networked experience is assembled first and foremost through relations, which make up its most immediately sensed and perceived aspect. Munster critically considers a range of contemporary artistic and cultural practices that engage with network technologies and techniques, including databases and data mining, the domination of search in online activity, and the proliferation of viral media through YouTube. These practices—from artists who “undermine” data to musicians and VJs who use intranetworked audio and video software environments—are concerned with the relationality at the core of today's network experience.

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