We invite you to the final lecture in the New Media Art Today series in 2026. Theorist, curator, and art critic Noemi Purkrábková will present her research and projects. 

At least since the advent of new media, we have known full well that the “image” is something unstable, difficult to define, and, paradoxically, increasingly less visible to the eye. Generative images represent an unprecedented intensification of these qualities: given their multiplicity and processual interconnectedness, they can no longer be adequately grasped as individual images, but only as metastable visualizations of operations taking place across various domains and scales.

This lecture will present several theses from a dissertation project examining the ontogenetic properties of generative images—that is, the way they come into being and the question of what “generativity” means beyond a purely technical definition, as well as its theoretical implications.

Our starting point will be examples from contemporary moving-image art as well as other audiovisual material characterized by the constant transformation of forms, the blurring of content categories, and often a striking inclination toward motifs of literal consumption, digestion, and decomposition.

It is precisely through the depiction of these metabolic processes that the lecture explores how the plane of visual representation can help us understand the functioning of generative technologies. Building on Gilbert Simondon’s method of transduction, it offers several operational analogies between visible mutations of the image, transformations of media in vector space, and broader transformations of the environment. 

Noemi Purkrábková is a media theorist, curator, and art critic. She is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Film Studies, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, and an assistant professor at the Department of Photography, FAMU. She is a co-founder of the art collective BCAAsystem, an editor of the magazine *Art Antiques*, and a member of the experimental curatorial platform Proto Gallery Systems.