Lecture "If an Instagram post has no likes, is it art? On the Role of the Artist in the Age of Social Media " with Anika Meier

On Wednesday, August 2, at 6 p. m. , you will be invited to an exciting lecture on fine arts at the Stadtmuseum. Jacob Birken is a cultural and media historian. After his studies at the HfG Karlsruhe, he worked at various cultural institutions and universities. In 2018 he received his doctorate on “Pictures of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake”. He focuses on the political culture of the United States in the “long” 19th century and the history of digital visual media.

In his lecture “Calculated Image Worlds” he deals with computer-generated images. Images created with software such as Midjourney or DALL-E have been confusing the art and media worlds for months: what the machine turns out to be a text request may look deceptively like a photograph or be an unexpected subject in a well-known artistic style.

In this lecture Jacob Birken wants to discuss the problems and possibilities of such software: What consequences does this industrial image production have for the artistic and design professions? What does it mean for our common concepts of authorship and copyright if a software on demand delivers something that should look like any other image? In what way does the machine challenge visual artists as ‘competitors’, and how can such techniques be integrated into artistic practice in a self-confident and reflective way?

The lecture starts at 6 p. m. in the Stadtmuseum and is free of charge.