Anna Näslund

I am professor of Art History at Stockholm University and researcher at the Institute for Futures Studies. My research focuses on visual culture, picture theory and digitization.  The project Selling Pic traces the genealogy of contemporary AI-generated image hype over 200 years of promoting technologies for the production, reproduction, and circulation of pictures on a mass scale. It aims to understand the historical role of pictures not merely as commodities but as agents of commerce. The project focuses on emerging picture techniques in the 1820s, 1920s, and 2020s, examining iconographic and discursive patterns in pictures of mass reproduction (metapictures) and comparing vernacular picture theories—expressed in advertising copy and trade journalism—with canonical picture theories. Rooted in historical material practices, the project seeks to clarify and expand our understanding of how and why pictures play a central role in the work of selling in modern and contemporary societies.

Ghost Platform: Generating the "Complex Image" of Data, Labour, and Logistics

This project aims to create a platform that makes visible the conflicts in transport logistics that are mostly being concealed from public view.

Selling pictures. Pictorial Economy and Commoditization 1820–2020

This project will place the current discussions concerning AI-generated images in a historical context, comparing it to two previous technological breakthroughs that have affected the use of pictures for commercial purposes. 

The purpose of the project is to stimulate and discuss knowledge-based text production alongside the dominant academic formats, to contribute to more animated writing and readable texts by scholars, and thereby enlarge their audience.

Household-distributed national accounts: New perspectives on the distribution of income and wealth in Sweden, 1930-2020

This project examines new perspectives on economic inequality in Sweden.

 A demographer calculates how the average life expectancy can be affected In Sweden, we now experience the first pandemic that occurs in a society with modern information technology, and it is also the

Kapitel 3. http://www.russellsage.org/publications/parents-to-children Abstract This chapter analyses the role of cognitive ability, personality traits, and physical characteristics in transmission of so

The paper describes intergenerational redistribution in Sweden the year 2003. Looking over the whole life, the summed per capita consumption from both the private and public side is quite smooth until

The paper argues that it is not sufficient to restrict calculations of effects of social reforms on individual welfare to income streams, but necessary to model individual behavior and thereafter calc

How much crime can foreign background explain? with Amber Beckley

Can the number of people with foreign background living in an area explain the level of crime in that same area? In this talk Amber Beckley gives us the numbers and finds a correlation that points cle