Spring 2026 Warnock Lecture, presented by the Department of Art History
Antonio Somaini (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris): The World Through AI: Material Infrastructures and Latent Spaces
Abstract: The lecture will discuss the exhibition The World Through AI, first presented at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris in 2025, and on view this year, in updated and adapted versions, in contemporary art museums in Frankfurt and São Paulo. It will analyze artworks that have critically engaged, during the last ten years, with the question of what it means to experience the world through AI: that is, what it means to perceive, imagine, remember, think, write, and produce images and sounds in a world increasingly innervated by AI technologies. Drawing on Siegfried Kracauer's concept of 'surface-level expressions,' the lecture will argue that images and artworks offer a unique point of entry into the otherwise opaque material infrastructures and latent spaces of contemporary AI — revealing its extractive material costs, its colonial genealogies, its transformation of visual culture, and its profound reconfiguration of our relationship to memory, evidence, and the past.
Lecture: 5:30–7:00pm
Reception: 7:00–8:00pm
Caitlin Kelley Burney
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