Picture in black and white with a round machine drawing an uneven graph on a paper. — Photo: Éric Baudelaire – What It Is Of (2023)

HDK-Valand and the Röhsska Museum explore artificial ways of seeing

Published

6 May 2025

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How does our way of seeing and understanding the world change when our frames of reference are reshaped by AI? This is one of the main questions as Simon Fageus at HDK-Valand works with pieces from the Röhsska Museum, the Hasselblad Foundation, and invited designers and artists during a two-week period in May.

Artificial intelligence shapes our understanding of the world by revealing patterns in images and texts on a scale beyond human capacity. Through its algorithms, it creates new connections and ways to interpret our surroundings.

– These technologies influence our ability to categorize and relate to objects, people, or landscapes. But perhaps we are now living in a time where they not only reshape how we see the world—but also how knowledge is created and shared? says Simon Fageus, PhD candidate in design at HDK-Valand and one of the people behind the project Artificial Ways of Seeing.

Public symposiums and workshops
As part of the project, two public symposiums will be held, on May 7 and May 14, where visitors are invited to join artists, researchers, and PhD students from HDK-Valand in exploring how references are created, changed, and negotiated in interdisciplinary research.

– We are very pleased with the collaboration with the Röhsska Museum, which offers a public space where we can explore different ways of understanding artificial intelligence in front of an audience. Our research on AI and its fundamental consequences for democracy creates new conditions for interdisciplinary discussion—where artistic works and methods are central, says Elena Raviola, researcher at HDK-Valand and supervisor in the project.

Om projektet:

Artificial Ways of Seeing runs from May 6–18 and is a doctoral project within the research program ”AI, the Social Contract and Democracy” unded by WASP-HS and involving researchers from the Faculty of Law and HDK-Valand at the University of Gothenburg (Matilda Arvidsson, Hedvig Lärka, and Gregor Noll from Law, and Simon Fagéus and Elena Raviola from HDK-Valand).

The collaboration with the Röhsska Museum also forms part of the research project DiNoBord and is co-funded by the research program Future Challenges in the Nordics and Söderberg Professorship in Design Management.

Area

Event Culture and languages