The Living Archive. Synthetic Images as Multi-Sensory, Dialogical Spaces of Experience in Contemporary Art

My lecture explores the imaginative and reparative potential of AI-generated images, focusing on artists who use synthetic image technologies to address the gaps in diasporic, migrant and queer experiences within existing material and virtual image archives. By subverting the biased representation models of most AI systems, the discussed works develop multi-sensory, speculative body images that propose dialogical spaces of experience in the exhibition room.

Julien Creuzet, Algorithm ocean true blood moves, 2023

Jana Johanna Haeckel is an art historian, curator, and lecturer based in Brussels. Her written and curatorial work examines image and body politics in contemporary art, focusing on new ethics of photography in the age of the digital and art practices that subvert historical and colonial narratives through archival research. Jana holds a PhD in art history from Université catholique de Louvain and works as an independent curator. She currently lectures at the Photography and Curatorial Studies Department at The Royal Art Academy Ghent, KASK & Conservatorium, where she supervises the research cluster Archival Sensations. Prior to this, she served as director of Photoforum Pasquart in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland, and has worked as curator and project manager for the Goethe-Institut Brussels. She was a lecturer at the University of Applied Science and Art Dortmund, Université catholique de Louvain and LUCA School of Arts Brussels and has guest lectured at various international universities and art schools, such as HFBK Hamburg, CEPV Switzerland, UDK Berlin and Freie Universität Berlin. Her essays and reviews have been published in The British Journal of Photography, Trigger, EIKON, Monopol, Mousse Magazine and elsewhere.

Jana Johanna Haeckel. Photo by Mimo Rapp