• Akademie der Künste / Hanseatenweg / Studio
Synthetic Images

with Bahar Noorizadeh, McKenzie Wark

Moderated by Bani Brusadin

  • Conversation
Passes only
Synthetic Images

In an hour-long conversation, McKenzie Wark and Bahar Noorizadeh explore the capitalist forces behind digitally generated and highly scalable images, questioning how their infrastructural coupling with large-scale computational systems generates affect. From Tesla Gigafactories to urban rave scenes, they anticipate and speculate on the possible futures of cities, capitalism, and their consequences on their workers and dwellers. Speaking about how images, subjects, and their affects are instrumentalised and function, they call attention to the synthetic constructions grounded in distraction, speculation, and economics, and question, how are images mobilised? And for what purposes?

McKenzie Wark 's books include *Capital is Dead*, *Molecular Red*, and *Reverse Cowgirl*, all available also in German translation. She lives and teaches in New York City.
Bahar Noorizadeh looks at the relationship between art and capitalism. In her practice as an artist, writer and filmmaker, she examines the conflictual and contradictory notions of imagination and speculation as they suffuse one another.