readings

In [M. Beatrice] Fazi’s account of the discrete, quantitative, and axiomatic nature of computation, for example, algorithms do participate in the broader world of social, political, and even material phenomena, but only in a secondary manner in terms of their application and implementation in the world. For her, algorithms are “the a priori intelligible” of computing (2018a, 106). By this, Fazi means that they are mathematical ideas that preexist their embedding into a program or code, and only a particular code or program a posteriori operationalizes them.  Anna Munster. 2025. Deep Aesthetics: Computational Experience in a Time of Machine Learning. Duke University Press.

As David Lapoujade puts it, “Pure experience is the set of anything that is in relation with something else” (2019, 13). The empirical is just that domain of any and every relation in its/their process of relating, but James’s emphasis on, and attention to, the processes of relating makes his version of empiricism radical. Anna Munster. 2025. Deep Aesthetics: Computational Experience in a Time of Machine Learning. Duke University Press.

My use of a term such as deepaesthetics aims to work productively with this problem of how to sense or register what is occurring imperceptibly, whether that involves operations, statistical techniques, or the qualities of relations in ML’s computational experience. Anna Munster. 2025. Deep Aesthetics: Computational Experience in a Time of Machine Learning. Duke University Press.

However, computational experience is entangled with modes of sensing that are not only beyond human sensing but, as Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman argue, beyond perception… Anna Munster. 2025. Deep Aesthetics: Computational Experience in a Time of Machine Learning. Duke University Press.

Since the eighteenth century, philosophical debate has oscillated between the different positions taken up by, on the one hand, Immanuel Kant’s categorization of aesthetic judgment in his 1770 Critique of Judgment, which ultimately grounded aesthetic value in a disinterested appraisal of perceived, sensory phenomena (1987, 44), and, on the other, Alexander Baumgarten’s Aesthetica of 1758, in which he considered all sensory experience to be aesthetic. Anna Munster. 2025. Deep Aesthetics: Computational Experience in a Time of Machine Learning. Duke University Press.

Experience, then, for ML, is simultaneously quantifiable as a state of measurable change and the ongoing process of learning that variably qualifies what that change is to be over time. Anna Munster. 2025. Deep Aesthetics: Computational Experience in a Time of Machine Learning. Duke University Press.

… the Loab imagescape registers something real: the statistical reconfiguration of experience by ML computing. Anna Munster. 2025. Deep Aesthetics: Computational Experience in a Time of Machine Learning. Duke University Press.

Crucially, pure experience is not made by or filled with things or places such as “subject” and “object” but is generated through relations and processes, which [William] James terms “co-ordinate phenomena” organizing its space-times (1977, 199). So too do relations organize the space-time of computational experience and its weird yet powerfully generative topologies.  Anna Munster. 2025. Deep Aesthetics: Computational Experience in a Time of Machine Learning. Duke University Press.

This, according to [Sven] Lütticken, means that, “[a]esthetic art” is aesthetic practice to the extent that it questions and challenges the relative autonomy of art. The aesthetic is the constant questioning of art and, more precisely, of claims for art’s autonomy, counteracting its reduction from persistent problem to ideological given.” Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.

Contemporary works of art are difficult to recognize as art from the perspective of modern aesthetic theory because, at a formal, objective level, they can neither be included under the tradition of a particular art form, nor do they limit themselves to the traditional artistic media, but assimilate new technologies and industrial modes of production, among other things, in artistic practice (…)  Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.

I argue that the exhibition form is constitutive of the work of art — which is why “exposition” might be a more appropriate term than “exhibition,” as the latter may perhaps be taken to refer to something pre-existing, i.e. a re-presentation or display. Any work of art has a structure of address — an Appellstruktur in the terminology of Wolfgang Iser — that informs the ways in which it can be received. It is thus, in a fundamental way, addressing and exposing itself to a public of indefinite strangers. Subsequently, the curator can make it address a public at another level and in any given context, but the first moment of exhibition already occurs in and through the address of the work “itself” — a work of art always already involves an act of exhibition in its initial address to someone, a you, an audience, readers, listeners, spectators, participants, collaborators. It is open to be “received” by anybody who is able to enter into its structure of enunciation, and who will actualize or concretize it. Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.

In addition, West stresses that exhibitions are the media of art’s public realization: “as media, art exhibitions should be conceived of as affirmative in their mediating functions. They are spatial and technical arrangements through which artworks are publicly realized.” Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.

According to curator Bruce W. Ferguson: [E]xhibitions of art are, by virtue of their visible prominence, structurally intrinsic and perhaps psychologically necessary to any full understanding of most art. Exhibitions can be understood then as the medium of contemporary art in the sense of being its main agency of communication — the body and the voice from which an authoritative character emerges. Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.

The act of exhibition makes something/the work present but, at the same time, it creates a distance, precisely because the appearance of the work has been arranged and addressed to someone/us; what is exhibited is given as having been organized and deliberately made available to appear to us. This distance to the object presented installs a difference and an indeterminacy with regard to its status and meaning. Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.

Pensive images invite us to pay attention to the image, to how it becomes an image, and how it functions, to what it does — what it affirms and makes seen, and what it blinds us from seeing and renders invisible. The notion of the pensive image refers to a zone of indeterminacy between the passive and the active, between the image as duplicate of a thing — as a representation or reproduction of the world — and the image as artistic operation — as creative agent — and also to a zone of indeterminacy between non-art and art; between the image as part of society’s image circulation, parading as a representation, on the one hand, and the image as resistance, a space for imagination, on the other.  Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.

Paglen’s work demonstrates that deciding what images mean is the root of power. Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.

According to Paglen, digital images are revolutionary because they are fundamentally machine-readable and can only be seen by humans in special circumstances and for short periods of time. This machine-readability of digital images allows for the automation of vision on an enormous scale. Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.