On the Retro-active Impact of Algorithmic Deletion on Art History

Technical censorship of images is omnipresent and yet invisible. Content moderation in social media and automatic deletion via algorithms create a new constellation of human and non-human actors that evoke ethical and juridical shifts in the realm of images. Traditionally, institutions such as courts and churches had been regulating limits of representation, thus articulating value systems of social environments that also had an impact on classical art historical debates and curatorial practice. Today, those control mechanisms and therefore decisions on what might irritate a sensitive viewer or how the youth could be protected against explicit content are part of digital ecosystems. In many cases the visibility of images is regulated automatically through socio-technical scripts of international corporations (e.g. Facebook, Google). This experimental phase of digital culture and media has a retro-active effect on how art historical research handles problems of censorship within art institutions and academic discussions. In this audio-visual-presentation Katja Müller-Helle addresses some technical, ethical, and art historical problems that occur when technical automatism spill into and influence decision making in the field of art’s visibility.