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Seeing is believing, until it isn’t.
In today’s image-saturated present, images not only organise desire but fabricate realities, make violence visible and invisible, and increasingly ask us to believe without knowing what we are looking at.
Images are scraped into datasets and generated through models, optimised for attention and circulated through infrastructures built on extraction. The image has become unstable: a representation, a prediction, a weapon, a feeling. At the same time, visibility continues to promise recognition and political agency, even as being seen increasingly means being measured, classified and captured.
How To Read An Image brings together artists, writers and researchers to explore the fantasies of visibility, the circulation of doubt, ambient forms of persuasion and the models through which reality is calculated. With contributions from McKenzie Wark, Hadi Afif, Donatella Della Ratta and Noura Tafeche, Maya Man, Rosa Menkman, Simone C. Niquille, Luiza Prado, Georgina Voss and Alex Quicho.
Across three days, the conference asks: how do we read an image when the image feels more real than reality?
Curated by Nora O’ Murchú and presented in partnership with FACT and The Institute of Art and Technology (IAT) at Liverpool John Moores University, How To Read An Image is a three-day conference exploring how images train the real, organising what we see, feel and believe.
18:00 | McKenzie Wark Opening Keynote
McKenzie Wark explores the ‘cis gaze’: a way of looking that polices normative ideas of gender and is anxious about deviations from them. Considering what it means to be trans as an art of both seeing and appearing, Wark asks how these tactics might resist, evade or exploit the gaze at a time when seeing and classifying are increasingly delegated to machines.
Followed by a Q&A with curator and writer Helen Kaplinsky.
12:30 | Registration and Refreshments
13:00 | Introduction and Welcome
Maitreyi Maheshwari, Head of Programme at FACT, and Joasia Krysa, Professor of Exhibition Research and Director of The Institute of Art and Technology, Liverpool John Moores University.
13:30 | Alex Quicho: Aura Points
A suspiciously superficial theory about the 'high-aura’ activities of staging selfhood for the planetary camera; and the simultaneous orientation of actually-existing Girl Intelligence towards mystery and sycophantic deception. A girl becomes a hyper-visible totality while she black-boxes her inner world—something she is able to achieve because humanity underestimates her agency and autonomy.
14:00 | Luiza Prado: Cloud Commensalities
The Cloud might appear immaterial, but its worlds are built from water, land, labour and extraction. In this lecture-performance, Luiza Prado stages an encounter between two figures inhabiting its contradictions to uncover the material, environmental and colonial infrastructures hidden behind our digital lives.
Luiza Prado's lecture-performance is supported by the Goethe-Institut London.
14:30 | Alex Quicho and Luiza Prado: The Fantasy of Visibility
Alex Quicho and Luiza Prado consider the promise of visibility as a form of recognition and power, and what happens when being seen also means becoming available for circulation, measurement and extraction. Together, they ask what other forms of power might begin with refusing to appear.
15:00 | Break
15:30 | Georgina Voss - 20/Happy
Moving between synthetic images, visual half-truths and her own experience of retinal detachment, Georgina Voss asks what it means to look when vision itself feels uncertain. Using visual deception and the familiar gestures and language of eye tests, 20/Happy explores how we decide what we see – and the feelings produced when images can no longer be trusted.
16:00 | Break
16:30 | Simone C. Niquille: The Wonderful World of Chair
What does a machine need to see in order to recognise a body, a chair or a room? Moving through synthetic training data, computer vision, 3D models and simulation, Simone C. Niquille explores the choices, categories and standards used to translate the messiness of the world into forms that software can understand. Followed by a conversation with curator Nora O’ Murchú exploring the politics of synthetic images, classification and what it means to live within models made of the world.
17:30 | Drinks
18:30 | Maya Man: StarQuest
Drawing on her childhood as a competitive dancer, Maya Man brings together the spectacle of American competition dance, social media and generative AI to explore what happens when being seen becomes a condition of everyday life. Through performance, choreography and synthetic dancers, StarQuest asks what happens to identity when performing the self becomes something we learn from both machines and each other.
19:30 | Evening Drinks + Social
12:30 | Registration and Refreshments
13:00 | Introduction and Welcome
13:30 | Hadi Afif: Occupying the Imaginary with Vid Simoniti
Taking the rise of AI-generated ‘slopaganda’ as a starting point, Hadi Afif examines images of Gaza, Lebanon and contemporary warfare to explore how political fantasies are generated and circulated across digital platforms. Joined by Vid Simoniti, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, he considers how propaganda becomes ambient, accumulating through repetition and familiarity as part of our everyday visual environment.
14:30 | Break
15:00 | Rosa Menkman: Image Types
Images are not static objects: they are continually redefined as they move across versions, systems, formats and platforms. Rosa Menkman examines the growing vocabulary used to describe contemporary images. From ‘poor’ and ‘synthetic’ images to ‘algorithmic’ and ‘invisible’ images, Menkman asks what this proliferation reveals about how we understand images today.
15:45 | Rosa Menkman and Georgina Voss: Technical Doubt
Rosa Menkman and Georgina Voss explore doubt as a condition of contemporary technical life, moving between images, glitches, technological systems and politics. Together, they ask how uncertainty is produced, managed and concealed and whether doubt itself might offer another way of reading systems that refuse to fully reveal themselves.
16:30 | Break
17:00 | Donatella Della Ratta and Noura Tafeche: School of the Image - Constellations
Donatella Della Ratta and Noura Tafeche explore how images create meaning through their relationships with other images. Drawing on the idea of the ‘constellation’, this lecture-performance traces how images think, remember and connect across different times and contexts, asking us to read every image as already entangled with other images, memories and histories. The lecture performance is followed by a conversation with Nora O’ Murchú.
18:00 | Closing
Join us for one day or experience the full three-day conference. Individual tickets are available for Friday’s keynote, Saturday and Sunday, or book a Weekend Pass for access to the complete programme.
Weekend Pass – £30
Weekend Concession – £25
Friday Keynote – £10
Saturday – £15
Sunday – £15
Nora O’ Murchú is a curator, writer and researcher whose work examines the politics of contemporary technologies and their infrastructures. She is Associate Professor at the University of Limerick.
How To Read An Image is curated by Nora O’ Murchú and presented in partnership with FACT and The Institute of Art and Technology (IAT) at Liverpool John Moores University.
Image: Simone C Niquille, Beauty and the Beep (2024). Courtesy of the artist.
Most of How To Read An Image takes place in The Box, located on the ground floor of FACT, with wheelchair spaces available. Live captions will be available throughout the conference.
Friday’s keynote takes place in Screen 2 on the second floor, which is accessible by lift and has dedicated wheelchair spaces.
If you have any access requirements or would like to discuss your visit before the conference, please email info@fact.co.uk or call 0151 707 4444 (11:00–18:00, Tuesday–Sunday).
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