Digital images between manipulation and power

Before artificial intelligence swept all before it, photographic images were often considered manipulable but more or less realistic. Nowadays, it is often unclear whether there is actually an original photo in the first place. Images are not only digitally edited and modified at will, but artificially and algorithmically generated and disseminated. Increasingly, moreover, they are being used systematically for political purposes and have enormous reach, especially on social media platforms. For the most part, these platforms are not controlled by democratic bodies, but by private companies.

What role are digital images playing in the profound transformation of the global political order which is currently underway? This question is addressed in “The Digital Image,” a Priority Program funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and led by LMU Munich and Marburg University. At the closing conference, the participating researchers will be discussing the political dimension of the digital image under the current conditions of what is frequently called the “authoritarian turn.” Certainly, digital images seem to be playing a decisive role in this turn.

Rapid change through artificial intelligence

“Images have huge potential for conveying messages in emotionally charged form, manipulating the public at large, and thus contributing to the establishment of authoritarian structures and the consolidation of power,” says Professor Hubert Locher, spokesperson for the second phase of the Priority Program and director of the German Documentation Center for Art History – Marburg Picture Index (DDK) at Marburg University.

In making the political function of digital visual media the main focus of the conference, the participants are doing justice to the developments of the past six years. After all, the situation has changed considerably since the launch of the project in December 2019 – before the coronavirus pandemic.

“During the term of the program, we’ve observed not only a rapid change in digital technologies – a development whose dynamics were unforeseeable – but also a sea-change in the political situation,” says Professor Hubertus Kohle, spokesperson of the first phase of the Priority Program from the Institute of Art History at LMU.

Digital images and authoritarian currents

If enthusiasm for the productive and knowledge-enhancing aspects of new digital image technologies predominated at the beginning of the project, sobriety has since taken hold to a great extent. Alongside the tremendous advances in the development of AI, there are ongoing attempts at monopolization on the part of the big-tech companies. The effects of these monopolistic tendencies on scholarship can scarcely be appraised at this point, note the researchers. And in curious ways, these concentration processes are connected with the dubious success of right-wing to far-right populist movements in the United States, but also in many European countries.

The researchers therefore want to explore the extent to which digital images are implicated in the genesis and consolidation of authoritarian regimes, how they function in the platform economies of the present, and whether they still have emancipatory potential.