In recent years, analytic and generative AI models have been gradually transforming our relation with the past: with history, memory, and the archive. The reconstruction of the past has always been technically mediated and politically contested, yet contemporary AI introduces a distinct regime of mediation: one in which historical materials are reorganized within computational spaces that determine their visibility, legibility, and narratability. What is at stake is therefore a shift in historicity itself: in the technological and epistemological frameworks that make history thinkable. The talk will analyze this ongoing transformation from the perspective of visual culture theory and through a series of artworks (many of which presented in the exhibition The World Through AI with its different versions) engaging in different ways with AI technologies.

Antonio Somaini is Professor of Film, Media, and Visual Culture Theory at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, and a Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). In recent years he has been visiting professor at Yale (2022) and at Harvard (2024, 2025). In 2025 he has been the chief curator of the exhibition Le monde selon l'IA / The World Through AI at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris, which is currently on view, in new versions, at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt and at the SESC 24 de Maio in São Paulo. Among his recent publications, the essays  “Latent Spaces: AI, Art, and the Archive” (October 196, Spring 2026, pp.18-60), "A Theory of Latent Spaces” (in the catalogue of the exhibition The World Through AI, Paris: Jeu de Paume / JBE Books, 2025, pp. 21-51), and  “Algorithmic Images. Artificial Intelligence and Visual Culture” (Grey Room 93, Fall 2023, pp. 74-115).