Capturing personal data in exchange for free services is now ubiquitous in networked media and recently led to diagnoses of surveillance and platform capitalism. In social media discourse, dataveillance and data mining have been criticized as new forms of capitalist exploitation for some time.

From social photos, selfies and image communities on the internet to connected viewing and streaming, and video conferencing during the Corona pandemic – the digital image is not only predominantly networked but also accessed through platforms and structured by their economic imperatives, data acquisition techniques and algorithmic processing. In our lecture, we want to show how participation and commodification are closely linked to the production, circulation, consumption and operativity of images and visual communication, raising the question of the role networked images play for and within the proliferating surveillance capitalism.

On the other hand, networked images can become anaesthetized, “calm” and “silent” themselves – in a similar way to the techniques of control and surveillance: Against the background of surveillance capitalism, technological endeavours such as the internet of things (IoT), ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence appear as attempts to expand the opportunities for data extraction and monetization. Everyday objects become sentient things that are capable of multimodal monitoring of environments and living beings, and of recording, storing and circulating captured information. Visual data acquisition in the form of sensors, webcams or computer vision operates without drawing attention to itself. Often, not only the technologies are invisible, but also the images that are no longer destined for human viewing and remain data without being visually displayed.

By being processed in machine-to-machine seeing and communication within IoT or used as training data for computer vision application (Crawford and Paglen 2019), the networked and social media images are anaesthetized and rechanneled into an invisible “visual” culture as new economic assets. These “invisible image data” or “invisible images” share their unobtrusiveness with algorithmic security systems such as facial recognition, which exploits the publicness of the face, and produces “calm images” operating in the background without addressing the users’ conscious attention.

1. Regular Attendance (50%)

2. Participation and presentation (50%)

Our course focuses on agile learning, participation and cooperation. We expect a productive and lively cooperation from this concept, in which the rigid boundaries between teachers and students can be lifted.

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