Date: 17 September 2026
Time: 09.30–16.00
Venue: Institute for Futures Studies, Holländargatan 13 i Stockholm
If you are interested in participating in this workshop, get in touch with Anna Näslund.
This seminar has been realized as part of the research project Selling Pictures: Pictorial Economy and Commoditization 1820–2020 (IFFS/Vetenskapsrådet 2025–2027). The main objective of the project is to create new knowledge about the specific role of mass- reproducible pictures in promoting, popularizing, and commoditizing technologies of pictorial mass production and consumption from the nineteenth century until today. At this seminar researchers involved in the project and members of its advisory board will present recent and ongoing research on various of aspects of how mass-produced and mass-reproduced pictures can be interpreted, datafied and studied.
9.30-10.00 Coffee and registration
10.00-10.10
Welcome and introduction
Nina Lager Vestberg & Anna Näslund
10.10-10.45
Estelle Blaschke: Image Capital
10.45-11.20
Thomas Smits: What Did the Victorians See? Using Multimodal AI to Analyze 72,000 News Illustrations
The Illustrated London News (1842–2003) revolutionized the representation of the news by combining text with high-quality wood-engraved illustrations. This paper uses multimodal AI and clustering techniques to map the 'embedding space' of Victorian news imagery. The clusters not only reveal patterns of attention and silence in the visual world of the ILN but also point to biases in modern AI models.
11.20-11.30 Break
11.30-12.05
Fabian Offert: What Are Artificial Intelligence Models Models Of?
AI models trained on large image corpora are now commonly described as models of culture – but what do we mean by that? My talk will argue that the utility of artificial intelligence for the humanities relies on a better understanding of the exact nature of the modeling relationship, disentangling – historically and epistemically – which particular ways of representing the world have emerged from different generations and architectures of artificial intelligence models.
12.05-13.30 Lunch
13.30-14.05
Caroline Archer Parré: Picturing Baskerville’s Punches
In this talk I will look at the challenges involved in digitally capturing images of small, shiny, metallic artefacts for research purposes, specifically the eighteenth-century typographic punches of John Baskerville. I will discuss how the images were made, how they informed our research, and how they have been made available to the public through an online digital library. I will also reflect on how, unintentionally, we created art out of art and how that gave us a new appreciation of these precious, and very beautiful, objects.
14.40-15.15
Wolfgang Brückle: Proto-photographic Reproductive Phantasmagoria
This talk traces the early modern fantasies on machine-assisted methods of representing reality, the creation of pictures that exceeded the achievable degree of faithful reproduction, and in extension the establishment of a photographic visual culture, avant-la-lettre.
14.40-15.15 Coffee
15.15-15.50
Nina Lager Vestberg & Anna Näslund: Pictorial Economy and Commoditization 1820–2020
In this talk we will present the ongoing research project on historical continuities and ruptures in the comoditization of picture making with a special focus on present-day mass consumption and circulation of visual content through online platforms and AI-aided picture generation.
Caroline Archer Parré, Professor of Typography, Birmingham City University, author of numerous books on various aspects of print culture, is an expert in the history of typography and co-director of the Centre for Printing History and Culture at Birmingham City University.
Estelle Blaschke, Professor of Photographic Media in the Digital Age, University of Basel and a specialist on the commercial history of photography, and the practices and effects of digital imaging technologies. Her current research focuses on concepts of photography as information technology and methodologies of Visual Science and Technology Studies (VSTS)
Wolfgang Brückle, PhD in Art History and senior lecturer at Luzerne University of Applied Arts, PI of the SNSF-funded research projects on post-photography and Collecting the Ephemeral. Expert in photography, post-photography and ephemeral visual culture.
Nina Lager Vestberg, Professor of Visual Culture at NTNU, Trondheim. Reseacrher in the project Pictorial Economy and Commoditization 1820–2020 at the Institute for Futures Studies, funded by the Swedish Research Council 2025–2028.
Anna Näslund, Professor of Art History at Stockholm University and affiliated scholar at the Institute for Futures Studies and PI of the research project Pictorial Economy and Commoditization 1820–2020 at the Institute for Futures Studies, funded by the Swedish Research Council 2025–2028.
Fabian Offert, University of California, Santa Barbara (https://zentralwerkstatt.org), Assistant Professor for the History and Theory of the Digital Humanities and Director of the Center for the Humanities and Machine Learning at UCSB. His research focuses on the epistemology, aesthetics, and politics of artificial intelligence. He is the author (with Leonardo Impett) of Vector Media (UMP, 2026), the first comprehensive history and theory of vector space as a space of universal commensurability in contemporary machine learning.
Thomas Smits, University of Amsterdam (http://thomassmits.eu), Assistant Professor of Digital History & AI, has pioneered the application of digital humanities methods in studying large corpora of illustrated historical periodicals. Expert on multimodal AI models, computational methods for vast corpora of pictures and historical print culture.
