Who Makes the World? Creative Labour, Synthetic Vision, and Artificial Intelligence.
Image Empire (2026; 3’36”), is an animated short film by Alan Warburton that tells the story of how 21st century visual culture is built through a simultaneous capture of real, human and nonhuman data, and world-modeling through simulation.
Thanks to decades of technical advances in computer vision and computer graphics, image-making tools are now at the disposal of both expert creatives and everyday people. On the one hand there are expanded capabilities in creative practice, but equally significant epistemic and social fractures and negative growth through malign adoption of image generation tools. Humans' visual perception and sense-making is now only one kind of contemporary ‘image operation’ (Farocki).
Floating in a soup of real, synthetic, and virtual, we are navigating new subjectivities and social relations emerging between legacy institutional norms, and new cultural, socio-economic, and socio-technical phenomena.
Image Empire is also a text that unpacks the recent history of image-making; together, the text and the film are a strategic media literacy project. Launched explicitly on LinkedIN, one of its ambitions is to invite entrepreneurs, technologists, policymakers, creatives, and studios grappling with automation in creative practice and the creative industries into shared critical conversation. This conversation goes deeper with the Cambridge event.
The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) will host a screening and hour-long fishbowl discussion (rather than a traditional panel) in which invited guests will kickstart a conversation about creative, commercial, and technical work at an industrial scale. Our invited guests include Sarah Brin, Padmini Ray Murray, Robert Dorschel, Alan Warburton, among others.
A fishbowl discussion places a small group of participants in an inner circle to have an active conversation while a larger group observes from an outer circle. Over time participants rotate in and out of the inner circle. A fishbowl can maintain the intimacy and depth of a small-group dialogue while allowing everyone to contribute, reducing the tendency for discussions to become dominated by a few loud voices, or to fragment into shallow exchanges. Remaining in the outer circle and observing and listening, is also an option.
We will start with a light lunch at noon and conclude by 3pm at the latest.
PARTNERS AND SUPPORTERS
Image Empire is commissioned by the National Videogame Museum, working with curator Hannah Redler-Hawes, in collaboration with the Open Data Institute Data as Culture; and Maya Indira Ganesh at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) at the University of Cambridge. Image Empire has been made possible by The Space, supported by Arts Council England.