Apart Symposium Call for Video Screenings

Call for Video Screenings

Today – once again – we find ourselves on the threshold of a profound shift and transformation. This time, the name of that change is: synthetic.

The foundations of digitisation were laid in the 1940s through technologies that enabled the numerical processing of information and the emergence of information theory. By the 2000s, digitisation had become embedded in the texture of everyday life, shifting us from the recorded physical trace to modelled reality, from the material to the calculable. Analogue photography and cinema, after all, are grounded in an indexical relationship. Light reflected from an object leaves a direct physical and chemical trace on the film emulsion, establishing a causal bond between the image and the world. For a long time, this bond allowed analogue images to be understood as certificates of reality. Digital imagery did not sever this relationship but transformed it. In place of the trace of light, it produced a numerical representation. Composed of 1s and 0s, this structure relied not on the continuity of the analogue image, but on discrete units, pixels and sampling processes. The analogue image was dense and continuous, containing infinite gradations between values. The digital, by contrast, became segmented, calculable, and infinitely reproducible. This rupture transformed the ontology of the image from a trace of the world into a computable simulation of it (Manovich, 2001).

We came to call that process the digital transformation. Today, however, we are confronted not merely with a modelled reality, but with a synthesised one. The image is no longer simply a tool of representation; it has become an object that generates itself. Rather than taking its reference from the external world, it constructs, reproduces, and redistributes itself from within. Together, we are trying to understand where the boundaries of this mode of production begin and end.

Martin Jay's concept of scopic regimes reminds us that vision is never merely a physiological act, but a practice historically, technologically, and ideologically constructed. For Jay, modernity is defined not by a single dominant gaze, but by the coexistence and conflict of multiple ways of seeing. The transition from analogue to digital, and from digital to synthetic, adds yet another layer to this plurality: algorithmic vision. It is no longer only humans who see; machines now see as well, not merely recording but interpreting and generating images.

This leaves us with a set of simple yet deeply unsettling questions: Is this a form of progress? Or is it an anomaly that restructures the ontological, cognitive, and perceptual foundations of visual culture? Is the synthetic replacing reality, or redefining what reality means?