Vision Machines: How Technology Enhances Our Gaze

Join Katharina Täschner and Katja Müller-Helle for a special guided tour of the exhibitions Lisa Barnard . You Only Look Once and Isadora Romero . Notes on How to Build a Forest. Together, they explore the theme of “vision machines.” The term, coined by French philosopher Paul Virilio in the late 1980s, refers to technologies that accelerate, enhance, and ultimately even replace the human gaze. According to Virilio, these developments not only change how we perceive the world, but also fundamentally shape our relationship to it.

Lisa Barnard’s exhibition traces the trajectory from the military history of aerial photography to today’s capabilities of machine vision. In contrast, Isadora Romero’s works explore experimental and speculative approaches that, through the camera, open up more-than-human perspectives. This guided tour invites visitors to engage with these expanded, technologically mediated forms of seeing.

Katja Müller-Helle is a scholar of art and media studies. She heads the research group The Technical Image at both the Institute for Art and Visual History and the Institute for Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt University of Berlin. She has been a fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome. Her research focuses on digital image cultures and image censorship, the history and theory of photography, and processes of visual evidence production.