Prof. Dr. Boris Čučković Berger

Book Prize: Laura Bassi Award, for the book manuscript Source Materialism: The Disenchanted Forms of Digital Production in Post-2008 Art

New Article: "Prompted Monads: Art, AI, and the Fantasy of Totality," Carrier Bag, edited by Hito Steyerl and Francis Hunger, Academy of Fine Arts Munich, https://carrier-bag.net/prompted-monads-art-ai-and-the-fantasy-of-totality/

Invited keynote: Image of the Artificial People? Towards a Social History of Art after AI & Platform Capitalism, at the final conference of "Das Digitale Bild" SPP project, University of Marburg, November 12th, 2025.

Invited keynote: What is Contemporary Art History, and Where is the Digital?, at "Talking Through Weibel" presented by The Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures, Die Angewandte, Vienna, November 14th, 2025.

Boris Čučković Berger is University Professor (W2) for art history and digital image cultures at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich since 15 August 2021. Before joining the LMU, he was Associate Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, as well as a Visiting Lecturer at the Aesthetics, Criticism and Theory programme of Jnanapravaha Mumbai (JPM). He works on critical studies of art and technology, with a research focus on digital forms of production in historical perspectives such as the 2008 financial crisis or the emerging socio-technical conditions of platform economies.

2009: Bachelor in Art History and Information Science (double major), University of Zagreb

2009: “Franjo Marković” Award, Council of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia

2010: Rector’s Award, University of Zagreb, Croatia

2011: Master in Art History: Modern and Contemporary (distinction), supervised by Eric C. H. de Bruyn, Leiden University

2012-2014: VU Fellowship Programme Award, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

2014: Research Master in Visual Arts, Media and Architecture (distinction), supervised by Sven Lütticken, VU University Amsterdam

2014-2017: CHASE Arts and Humanities Research Council funding Award in the UK

2015-2017: Teaching Assistant, The Courtauld Institute of Art

2017-2021: Associate Lecturer, The Courtauld Institute of Art

2019: PhD in Art History (no corrections), supervised by Julian Stallabrass and Josephine Berry, The Courtauld institute of Art, London

2021: Visiting Lecturer, Aesthetics, Criticism and Theory (ACT), Jnanapravaha Mumbai

2021: University Professor (W2), Institut für Kunstgeschichte, LMU München

• Book Prize: Laura Bassi Award, for the book manuscript Source Materialism: The Disenchanted Forms of Digital Production in Post-2008 Art

• New Article: “Prompted Monads: Art, AI, and the Fantasy of Totality,” Carrier Bag, edited by Hito Steyerl and Francis Hunger, Academy of Fine Arts Munich, https://carrier-bag.net/prompted-monads-art-ai-and-the-fantasy-of-totality/

Forthcoming Book: Source Materialism: The Disenchanted Forms of Digital Production in Post-2008 Art. With a Laura Bassi Award and funding for the associated editing costs awarded in 2025, publication is slated for 2026.

2026 Article: “Prompted Monads: Art, AI, and the Fantasy of Totality,” Carrier Bag, edited by Hito Steyerl and Francis Hunger, Academy of Fine Arts Munich, March 3, https://carrier-bag.net/prompted-monads-art-ai-and-the-fantasy-of-totality/.

2019 Book Review: “More Than Real: Art in the Digital Age,” volume edited by Daniel Birnbaum and Michelle Kuo, Critique d’Art. The International Review of Contemporary Art Criticism, Spring-Summer, 163, ISSN 2265-9404.

2018 Catalogue essay: “Encoding a Fractured World: Cong Yunfeng’s Landscapes for the Anthropocene,” The Sight of Code, Beijing Parkview Green Gallery.

2017 Article: “The Office and its Silicon Cage,” Immediations, Vol. 4, No. 2, 102–105, ISSN 1742-7444, https://courtauld.ac.uk/research/research-resources/publications/immeditations-postgraduate-journal/immediations-online/2017-2/boris-cuckovic-berger-the-silicon-cage-of-the-creative-workspace/.

2014 Peer Review Essay: “The Open Source Cultural Object: Grounds for the Political Aesthetics of Cultural Commons,” Leonardo Electronic Almanac, special issue Red Art: New Utopias in Data Capitalism, MIT Press, 22–42, ISBN 978-1-906897-28-4.

2012 Article: “Autonomy Today,” TkH Journal for Performing Arts Theory, special issue Art and Public Good, Belgrade (Serbia): TkH Platform, 16–21, ISSN 1451-0707, https://www.tkh-generator.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/tkh-20eng-web.pdf.

2012 Article: “The Contemporary Challenge of Specificity,” The Edgar Wind Journal, Oxford University, Hillary Term issue, 27–29.

2011 Peer Review Essay: “Performing (with) Sculptures: Expanding the Field of Sculpture with Fluid and Sound,” Spaces of Identity in the Performing Sphere, Sibila Petlevski and Goran Pavlić, eds. Zagreb: Academy of Performing Arts and Fraktura, 257–272, ISBN 978-953-266-311-2.

2011 Reviewed Journal Article: “The Articulation of Open Source Art and the Object of the Post-Media Situation” (Croatian title: Artikulacija umjetnosti open sourcea i objekta postmedijske situacije), in: Frakcija 60/61, Special Issue: Artistic Labor in the Age of Austerity, 136–146, ISSN 1331-0100.

2010 Journal article: “Tradicija zaborava” (The Tradition of Forgetting), Ljetopis SKD Prosvjete 10, 240–245.

2010 Peer Review Essay: “On Digitally Created Sculpture: The Problem of the Original, the Model and Unique Pieces” (Croatian title: Razmatranje skulpture ostvarene digitalnom tehnologijom: problem originala, modela i unikata), Annals of the Antun Augustinčić Gallery, special issue: Original in Sculpture, vol. 28/29, 271–288, ISSN 0352-1826.

2009 Peer Review Essay: ‘Open Source in Art: Originality, Art Process and Digital Preservation,’ co-author Hrvoje Stančić. Digital Resources and Knowledge Sharing, ed. David Bawden et al. Zagreb: Department of Information Sciences, University of Zagreb, 157-167.

Invited Lectures, Keynotes and Panels

2025 Invited keynote: Image of the Artificial People? Towards a Social History of Art after AI & Platform Capitalism, at the final conference of “Das Digitale Bild” SPP project, University of Marburg, November 12th.

2025 Invited keynote: What is Contemporary Art History, and Where is the Digital?, at “Talking Through Weibel” presented by The Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures, Die Angewandte, Vienna, November 14th.

2025 Respondent: (Re)Configuring the Non-Real-World Image in AI Models, panel with Dr. Stefanie Schneider at “Lunch Talks: Research Colloquium,” Centre of Advanced Studies, LMU Munich, November 25th.

2025 Invited speaker: Ping Pong mit Pixel, panel with Caroline von Courten, “Ping Pong mit der Kunstgeschichte,” LMU Munich, June 16th.

2025 Moderation: Simon Denny: Vibe-coding the Future, at the conference “Art in the Age of Average. The new AI-thoritarians,” Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich, June 4th.

2025 Guest lecture: Where Is the Digital? Crowdsourcing as Theme/Medium/Method of Contemporary Art, Doctoral Program at the Department of Art History, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, February 21st.

2024 Guest lecture: A Digital Angelus Novus? Virtual Image and the Material Destruction of War, at the colloquium “Kunstgeschichte und Krieg,” Central Institute for Art History, Munich, May 15th.

2024 Panel moderation: On Leisure and Limbo. Adriatic Nodes of Tourism and Migration, panel with Hanni Geiger and Ilir Tsouko at “Aquatic complexities. Tourism, aesthetics and dis:connections,” Käte Hamburger Research Centre, LMU Munich, September 12th.

2022 Invited keynote: Crisis Indices: Digital "Fehler" Beyond the Glitch, at the symposium “Poetik des Fehlers,” Institute of General and Comparative Literature, LMU Munich, July 29th.

2022 Invited keynote: The Problem of Digital Space in Arts & Humanities, Institute of Near and Middle Eastern Studies, LMU Munich, June 14th.

2021–
2025 Digital Art History Online Lecture series, organisation and chairing of invited talks from the relevant digital humanities scholarship, LMU Munich.

2020 Panel: Geoaesthetics: Art in Unstable Milieux, panel with Irit Rogoff and Anthony Iles, Royal College of Art, London, May 5th.

2019 Panel: What Do We Do When We Do Art History?, discussion after the film screenings on Georges Didi-Huberman and Svetlana Alpers, with Steffen Haug and Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra, Birkbeck Cinema, London, February 9th.

2019 Panel chair: Capitalism and Crisis, at the conference “Imagining the Apocalypse,” The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, October 18th-19th.

2018 Panel chair: Is Digital Art History More or Less Disciplined?, at the Mellon-funded conference “Art History: Undisciplined”, the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, June 19th–20th.

2018 Guest lecture: Capitalist Porosity: Digital Production in Post-crisis Art, Faculty of Humanities, organised by Professor Sven Lütticken, VU University Amsterdam, February 14th.

2017 Guest lecture: There and Back Again: The Status of Digital Production in Contemporary Art, graduate programme in “Digital Culture and Society” chaired by Dr Sara Marino, King’s College London, February 2nd.

2014 Guest seminar: Photographic Source Materials, at Caroline Levitt’s “Techniques and Meanings in Twentieth-century Art,” The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, November 19th.

Conference Papers (regular selection, excluding keynotes)

2025 The Digital Scale beyond a Cosmic Zoom: Critical Epistemologies of ‘the General’ and ‘the Specific’ in Post-Digital Art, paper for the workshop “Scaling from Digital and Computational Perspectives,” Centre for Advanced Studies, LMU Munich, 23rd May.

2023 Introduced and co-organised the two-day conference Krisenkünste: Crisis and the Arts at Schloss Nymphenburg in Munich, with support from the Siemens Stiftung. My paper framed the conference and call for papers. Keynote speaker: Peter Osborne, Kingston. January 12th and 13th.

2017 A Window to Capital: Amazon Mechanical Turk and the Aesthetic Conditions of Critique, at the College Arts Association (CAA) annual conference, session topic “Between Conformism and Subversion: Aesthetic Strategies and the Problem of the Political in Contemporary Art,” New York, February 15th–18th.

2017 Latency of Source Materials: The Problem of ‘Unsupported Transit’ in Photographic Representation c. 2008, at The Courtauld Postgraduate Conference, London, June 8th—9th.

2012 Where Representation meets Agency: The Idol in Modern Art, at the international conference “Presence and Agency: Rhetorics, Aesthetics and the Experience of Art,” LUCAS, Leiden University Center for the Arts and Humanities in Society, December 13th–15th.

2010 Performing (with) Sculptures: Fluid, Sound and the Digital, delivered with Igor Dvorščak at the international conference “Spaces of Identity in the Performing Sphere,” Zagreb. Organizing committee of the project “Discursive Identity in the Performing arts: Bodies, Personae, Intersubjects,” February 11th–14th.

2009 Open Source in Art: Originality, Art Process and Digital Preservation, at the international conference “INFuture2009: Digital Resources and Knowledge Sharing,” Department of Information Sciences, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, November 4th–6th.

2008 On Digitally Made Sculpture: The Problem of the Original, the Model and Unique Pieces, at the international conference “Original in Sculpture,” MHZ – Antun Augustinčić Gallery, Klanjec, July 4th–6th.