tactics&practice #17: Becoming Image

Curated by Marco De Mutiis, digital curator at Fotomuseum Winterthur, this edition of tactics&practice investigates the evolving role of images in contemporary life.Shaped by technologies such as machine vision, computer-generated imagery, algorithmic photography, and generative AI, images no longer merely represent the world but actively construct it. Beneath their surface, they are operational: images that perform, act, and decide. Untethered from any indexical origin, they generate new ontologies altogether. This edition of t&p explores how images have become environments to inhabit, agents to negotiate with, and interfaces for identity formation. Rather than reflecting reality, images now participate in it—reshaping perception, memory, and behavior. Artists included in Becoming Image work within and against these systems. They embed themselves in the same software stacks that animate digital bodies and govern surveillance feeds. They reappropriate the logics of imaging, using glitches, render artifacts, and compositional errors not as flaws but as communicative ruptures—points where the algorithm speaks back or breaks down. These works do not reject computation, but entangle with it.Through this entanglement, this edition of tactics&practice asks: What does it mean to see, to be seen, or to become visible when every act of seeing is mediated by software? What new subjectivities emerge when identity is co-produced with and through imaging? What political and economic functions, but also affective and emotional dimensions, does one have in a computational world-turned-image?The programme is structured around three interconnected nodes of activities, each addressing a specific aspect of the main theme. Through solo exhibitions, lectures, discussions, workshops, screenings, podcasts, and commissioned essays, tactics&practice fosters dialogue between artistic practice and critical reflection. Activities take place across various venues in Ljubljana: Aksioma Project Space, Centre for Urban Culture Kino Šiška, the Academy of Fine Arts and Design of the University of Ljubljana, the Slovenian Cinematheque, and Cukrarna Gallery.