How are computational optics operating in and through the built environment? How have they become so ubiquitous and taken for granted, completing the desires of fulfillment centres and the legibility that computation craves? What computational logics, imaginaries, and frameworks lie outside of their dominant modes of perception and commoditization?

Join us on Thursday 17 July as Kara Keeling and Simone Niquille share recent research and enter into conversation on the interrelated conceptual terrains of synthetic data, the limits of knowledge, absence, and computer vision’s contested modes of legibility. What do computers “see,” and in turn allow humans to draw profit or create private property from, while also projecting alternative ways of valuing perceptions that deviate from algorithmic and digital normativity?

This event is free and open to the public, but space is limited, so registration is required. Admission to the museum is included with your registration.

Simone C Niquille is a designer and researcher. With technoflesh Studio they produce films and writing that investigate computation as the new optics. Their work is concerned with vision technologies, the images they make and the worlds they create—from computer vision, 3d animation, and computational photography, to synthetic training datasets. Their work advocates for non-binary technology and against machine learning as a tool to validate and instrumentalize assumptions and reduce reality. In 2023 Niquille initiated the parametric truth Lab at the Master Information Design at Design Academy Eindhoven, a space to annotate, document, and review software beyond its immediate functionality and productivity, and since 2023 they coordinate a course on technology and architecture at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture. Niquille is a fellow in digital storytelling at the Dutch Film Festival for 2024–2025. In 2025 they joined the graduate school ARTILACS as PhD researcher at the HFBK Hamburg and are teaching a seminar on critical software at the Klasse Digitale Grafik.

Kara Keeling is Professor and Chair of Cinema and Media Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. Keeling’s research has focused on Black and queer media, representations of race, sexuality, and gender in cinema and media, film philosophy, digital media and technology, and cultural studies. Keeling’s most recent monograph, Queer Times, Black Futures, was published in 2019 by New York University Press. It considers the promises and pitfalls of imagination, technology, futurity, and liberation as they have persisted in and through racial capitalism by exploring how the speculative fictions of cinema, music, and literature that center black existence provide scenarios wherein we might imagine alternative worlds, queer and otherwise. Keeling is co-editor (with Josh Kun) of Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies, a collection of writings about sound and American Studies and (with Colin MacCabe and Cornel West) of a selection of writings by the late James A. Snead entitled European Pedigrees/ African Contagions: Racist Traces and Other Writing. Keeling’s essays have appeared in the journals GLQ, The Black Scholar, Women and Performance, and elsewhere. Keeling is past editor of the Moving Image Review section of Gay and Lesbian Quarterly (GLQ), current co-editor of boundary2: an international journal of literature and culture and serves on the editorial board of New Review of Film and Television Studies, and the advisory editorial board of Catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience.