Seeing Against Seeing

Seeing Against Seeing
Friday, October 9, 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Michelson Theater, 721 Broadway, 6th floor

This roundtable takes a limited edition artist book, Seeing Against Seeing (Nooscope, 2025), as its central case study, bringing author/artist Alexey Yurenev into conversation with Bogna Konior and Fred Ritchin to examine how AI-generated images transform the conditions of war photography.

Yurenev’s book, combines a bespoke GAN trained on WWII-era imagery with archival research and interviews, producing synthetic photographs that echo historical visual language while attempting to render what was never recorded: trauma, absence, and the psychological residue of war. Within this framework, Konior’s essay, War in the Age of Infinite Evidence, provides a critical lens on the shift from evidentiary scarcity to saturation. In parallel, Ritchin’s engagement with AI extends his long-standing critique of digital imaging, emphasizing both its destabilizing and generative potential: while computational images erode photography’s indexical claim to truth, they also demand new forms of visual literacy, ethics, and authorship, where the role of the photographer shifts from witness to constructor, editor, and context-builder. Together, the conversation moves between practice, theory, and history, positioning Seeing Against Seeing as both an artwork and a testing ground for thinking through what images do.

This is a hybrid event, open to the public.

Prior registration is required for in-person guests. Non-NYU attendees will receive emailed instructions for building access and may be asked to present a government-issued photo ID upon arrival. NYU attendees must present their NYU ID.

This event will also be available as a live Zoom Webinar. Registration through Zoom required.

Speaker Biographies

Alexey Yurenev is an artist, visual researcher, and educator whose practice examines memory, history, and the conditions through which images are produced and circulated. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Costakis Collection(Thessaloniki), Historical museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Sarajevo), Palazzo Poggi (Bologna) and FOAM (Amsterdam). His recent artist book Seeing Against Seeing explores war, collective memory, and machine-generated imagery through photography, archival material, and artificial intelligence, and is held in collections including Harvard University, The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Thomas J. Watson Library, Johns Hopkins University, and Duke University.Yurenev teaches at Columbia University and the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. He is a Fulbright Specialist.

Bogna Konior is a researcher and strategist focused on emerging technologies. She is currently working in R&D around the question of new technologies and post-war social transitions, focused on Ukraine. She is Polish, based between Ukraine and China, where she is Assistant Professor of Media Theory at NYU Shanghai’s Interactive Media department. Her forthcoming book with MIT Press draws on Eastern European intellectual history to reimagine the future of artificial intelligence. She is the author of The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Polity Press, 2025), and co-editor of Machine Decision is not Final: China, and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (Urbanomic, 2025).

Fred Ritchin was professor of Photography & Imaging at NYU from 1991-2014, and also taught for many years both in Interactive Telecommunications and Open Arts. He is former Dean of the School at the International Center of Photography, former picture editor of the New York Times Magazine, and author of four books on the future of imaging -- the most recent book is The Synthetic Eye: Photography Transformed in the Age of AI (Thames & Hudson, 2025). Ritchin created the first multimedia version of the New York Times and was nominated by them for a Pulitzer Prize in public service for "Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace," a non-linear photo essay. He is a current Guggenheim Fellow.