Yanai Toister

My academic trajectory began in art practice, primarily in photography and conceptual art, and was shaped by a number of significant international exhibitions. Those formative experiences, together with brief engagements in photojournalism and human rights work, eventually led me back to academia, where I turned to the theory and philosophy of art, analytic aesthetics, and German media studies. I am now primarily a scholar, though I still occasionally work with film and media art. My research has appeared in edited volumes and leading academic journals. My first scholarly monograph, Photography from the Turin Shroud to the Turing Machine (Intellect / University of Chicago Press), examined the conceptual evolution of photography as an inscriptive, depictive, and programmable medium, while also challenging entrenched notions of artistic authorship.

My current work sits at the intersection of visual studies, media philosophy, and image theory, with a particular emphasis on technical and synthetic images. Across these fields, I am interested in images not merely as representations but as epistemic and operational forms: as structures that organise perception, mediate cognition, distribute agency, and increasingly participate in social, technical, and ecological decision-making. Much of my research asks how visuality changes when images are generated, processed, and acted upon within computational systems, and how such changes compel us to rethink aesthetics, knowledge, and the conditions of public life.

Broadly, my research can be described through three interrelated trajectories:

(1) Algorithmic aesthetics, generative regimes, and computational image culture: This strand examines the historical and conceptual development of algorithmic thinking in relation to visual culture and aesthetics. Moving between early computer art, information aesthetics, generative photography, and contemporary machine learning, I explore how programmed procedures reshape inherited understandings of creativity, authorship, artistic labour, and aesthetic judgment. I am especially interested in the ways rule-based and model-based image production unsettle familiar distinctions between invention and execution, human and technical agency, and artwork and system. This research also considers how computational image practices invite a longer historical view, linking current debates around generative AI to earlier experiments in software, abstraction, and formalised aesthetic decision-making. Alongside this work, I am currently co-editing with Francesca Franco a volume on Frieder Nake, provisionally titled Being and Becoming, which revisits key questions in computational aesthetics and generative art from both historical and contemporary perspectives.
 

(2) Image thinking, distributed vision, and planetary-scale perception: This line of research develops the concept of image thinking in order to address the changing relation between images, cognition, and computation in the age of generative AI and planetary sensing. I am interested in how language models, diffusion systems, satellites, sensors, and other non-human image systems do not simply depict the world but increasingly participate in its cognitive and cultural co-production. This work moves from the feedback loops between language and synthetic imagery, and the ways such loops recalibrate imagination and perception, toward a broader account of distributed vision: a condition in which seeing and knowing are co-authored by expansive technical infrastructures. In this context, I investigate how epistemic authority migrates from individual observers to complex assemblages of code, data, platforms, and environmental sensing, and how such developments call for new visual epistemologies and ethical frameworks adequate to the political and ecological stakes of planetary-scale perception. 

   
(3) Post-ocular perception, autonomous systems, and the politics of civic access: This trajectory focuses on emergent visual infrastructures that exceed human sight and increasingly shape everyday urban life. This work also draws on a longer-standing interest in non-human perceptual models, including forms of animal perception such as echolocation and electroreception, as heuristic and conceptual resources for thinking beyond the limits of the human eye. Against that backdrop, I examine how autonomous and networked systems, especially in the context of mobility, operate through distributed sensoriums composed of cameras, LiDAR, radar, mapping systems, and machine-to-machine communication. My interest is not only in how such systems perceive, but in how their perception becomes socially operative while remaining largely closed to public scrutiny. This research asks what it would mean for non-driving publics to gain civic access to such infrastructural perception, and develops concepts such as the right to perceive, post-ocular urban perception, infrastructural illusion, and an ethics of acknowledgement. More broadly, it addresses how urban knowledge, public space, and civic agency are being reconfigured when perception is delegated to opaque technical systems.