The Synthetic Image (Professor Nuria Rodríguez-Ortega)

Speaker

Nuria Rodríguez-Ortega, Full Professor of Art History at the University of Málaga, Spain, and Founder and Director of iArtHis_Lab

Nuria Rodríguez-Ortega is an art historian specialising in digital and computational approaches to artistic culture. Her research focuses on the epistemological, methodological, and critical implications of digital technologies for art history, cultural analytics, and the transformations of cultural production and interpretation in the age of artificial intelligence. Her recent work explores generative AI, the relationships between language and image, and emerging regimes of signification in vectorial culture.

She is the founder and director of iArtHis_Lab, a research laboratory devoted to digital art history, and directs the Digital Art History Summer School (DAHSS) and the Telefónica–University of Málaga Chair on 5G, Digital Culture and Next Generation Technologies for Society. She served as Head of the Department of Art History (2009–2025) at the University of Málaga and President of the International Society for Hispanic Digital Humanities (2017–2021). She is a member of Academia Europaea.

She has led several funded research projects and collaborated extensively with the Getty Research Institute, including on the award-winning Digital Mellini project. Her publications include “Digital Art History: The Questions that Need to Be Asked” (Visual Resources, 2019), “Techno-Concepts for the Cultural Field: n-Dimensional Space and Its Conceptual Constellation” (Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, 2022), “Exploring the Concept of Transduction to Interpret AI-Generated Images” (Hertziana Studies in Art History, 2024), “Ekphrasis Reloaded: An Inquiry into the Word–Image Relationship in the Post-Semiotic Era” (Proceedings of the British Academy, 2026), and the edited volume Cultura en Digital (2023).

The synthetic image raises a question that cannot be resolved through an account of its technologies alone: how is meaning produced and interpreted when images emerge from vectorial representations and probabilistic operations that reorganise relations among cultural forms? Focusing on images produced through generative AI, this lecture approaches the synthetic image as a point of entry into what Professor propose to call the vectorial condition: a historically situated configuration in which vectorial and probabilistic operations participate in the constitution of signs and intersect with the cultural practices through which they acquire meaning.

Synthetic images emerge through operations that transform relations between language and image, suspending their distinction as separate media at the level of vectorial representation. Yet the conditions of their emergence do not coincide with those of their experience and interpretation: we encounter images, not vectors or probability distributions. This phenomenological gap is not simply a matter of technical opacity. It marks a tension between the computational constitution of signs and the conditions under which they become meaningful to human interpreters.

Drawing on the concept of transduction to approach the ontogenesis of synthetic images, this lecture takes a step towards a vector semiotics attentive to the tensions between the constitution of signs and the production of meaning. It asks how interpretation operates across this gap, where meanings are neither computationally predetermined nor independent of the processes through which images emerge. The aim is to develop conceptual distinctions for a cultural critique of the synthetic image, attending both to the vectorial and probabilistic conditions of its production and to the situated interpretive practices through which it acquires meaning.

Events are free and open to all unless otherwise stated. The seminar will take place from 5-6pm and is followed by a drinks reception in the English Social Space from 6-7pm.

If you have specific accessibility needs for this event please get in touch. We will do our best to accommodate any requests.accommodate any requests.

Event on CDH website: https://www.cdh.cam.ac.uk/events/42070

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GR06/07 Faculty of English, West Road, Cambridge, United Kingdom

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