This is a small, unofficial explainer page for the research group led by Leonardo Impett, which is divided between two institutions, each with their own institutional websites:
Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome and Cambridge Digital Humanities
We are also on Instagram.
About
The Machine Visual Culture research group investigates the reciprocal relationship between artificial intelligence and visual culture, focusing on how AI systems both shape and are shaped by histories of seeing. Combining digital art history with critical AI studies, the group explores AI not only as a technological tool but also as a cultural phenomenon with important implications for the humanities.
Our research project has two central axes. First, it situates AI within art history, examining how neural networks and other AI technologies encode cultural assumptions, visual ideologies, and epistemological frameworks. This includes studying the biases and representational practices embedded in AI training datasets and neural architectures, as well as the broader historical and theoretical contexts that underpin these systems. Second, the project develops and applies AI techniques to investigate the history of art and visual culture at new levels of scale and complexity, opening up new practical and theoretical avenues for art historical research while critically examining the assumptions and epistemologies embedded in these technologies.
By bridging these two perspectives, Machine Visual Culture offers an interdisciplinary approach that positions AI as both a subject of cultural critique and a transformative approach to art historical research, documenting a pivotal moment in the cultural history of AI.
For a quick summary of this approach, see: Leonardo Impett, “Digital art history as critical AI.” The Art Bulletin 106.2 (2024): 11-14.
The group runs parallel nodes in Rome at the Bibliotheca Hertziana and Cambridge at Cambridge Digital Humanities, hosting visiting researchers, artists, postdocs, and doctoral students. The Max Planck Institute funds the group in Rome; the group’s PhD students in Cambridge have won their own funding through a variety of sources, but primarily the Gates Foundation.
More information, and up to date events, are available on the Bibliotheca Hertziana website: https://www.biblhertz.it/en/machine-visual-culture
People
Rome Node
PI
Leonardo Impett is Research Group Leader at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for Art History, and Associate Professor in Digital Humanities at the University of Cambridge.
Scientific Assistant & Postdoctoral Fellow
Violaine Boutet de Monvel
Violaine Boutet de Monvel works on noise and recursivity in art and media, from video feedback systems to generative AI, drawing on contemporary art theory and media studies.
Digital Humanities Scientist
Riccardo Petrini
Riccardo Petrini is a coder and researcher working with ML, custom scripts, simulations, and real time systems. His work renders the internal, operational logics of computational models perceptible and traversable.
Postdoctoral Fellows
Valentine Bernasconi
Valentine Bernasconi works on the concept of embodied AI, the absence of the body in the production of art, and encapsulated perceptual constraints in historical representations.
Giulia Flenghi
Giulia Flenghi works at the intersection of art history, architectural representation, digital heritage, and machine vision. Her research examines how computational models detect and structure visual patterns, and how these processes can inform the analysis of visual culture.
Amira Moeding
Amira Moeding works on the intellectual history of computation, from early computational linguistics to contemporary AI models. Amira is interested in how data driven research cultures create new objects for both science and art.
Visitors
Robert Zamboni
Robert Zamboni is a PhD candidate in the Art, Technology, and Perception doctoral program at the Academy of Fine Arts, Conservatory of Music, and Laboratory of Nonlinear Spectroscopy in Florence, where his research focuses on the epistemology and aesthetics of multimodality in the age of AI.
Alexandra Gilliams
Alexandra Gilliams is a PhD candidate in Art History at Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University and a curator whose work explores the aesthetics and politics of artificial intelligence in contemporary art.
Lachlan Kermode
Lachlan Kermode is a PhD candidate in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, with a background in computer science and software research. His work examines the history of computer science and software engineering, twentieth-century mathematics, political economy, and critical approaches to contemporary AI and computing.
Aijia Zhang
Aijia Zhang is a PhD candidate at Heidelberg University working on computational approaches to Chinese lianhuanhua comics. Her research combines distant reading and distant viewing to study the relationship between text and image, visual conventions, narrative patterns, and the political and cultural meanings produced through multimodal media.
Administrative assistant
Katja Hackstein Katja Hackstein is Assistant to the Max Planck Research Groups of Leonardo Impett and Sietske Fransen at the Bibliotheca Hertziana.
Former Fellows
Sebastian Rozenberg (Linköping)
Sebastian Rozenberg is a PhD candidate at Linköping University working in media aesthetics and digital visual culture.
Tristan Dot (Cambridge)
See below.
Ellen Charlesworth (Durham)
Ellen Charlesworth is an AHRC funded PhD researcher at Durham University whose work examines how museums use digital platforms and how algorithmic infrastructures shape public access to cultural content.
Ángel Mª Lumbreras (Málaga)
Ángel Mª Lumbreras is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Málaga working at the intersection of digital humanities, AI, and computational art history, bridging theory and technical experimentation.
Eryk Salvaggio Was artist-in-residence; see below.
Former Visitors
Dominik Bönisch (Düsseldorf)
Dominik Bönisch is a researcher at MIREVI, Düsseldorf, working on AI based archiving, museum collections, and algorithmic mediation in cultural heritage.
Silvia Garzarella (Bologna / Utrecht)
Silvia Garzarella is a PhD candidate at the University of Bologna studying the remediation of intangible dance heritage, with a focus on the choreographic and archival afterlives of Rudolf Nureyev.
Cambridge Node
PhD Students
Tristan Dot
Tristan Dot is a PhD candidate in Digital Art History at the University of Cambridge, researching nineteenth century textile patterns and the epistemology of digital art history.
Alessandro Trevisan
Alessandro Trevisan works on the philosophy of language in LLMs, including multimodality and vision, especially in dialogue with Wittgenstein.
Emmanuel Iduma
Emmanuel Iduma is a writer, art critic, and Gates Scholar. His research looks at Nigerian conflict photojournalism through the lens of distant viewing.
Eryk Salvaggio
Eryk Salvaggio is a media artist and Gates Scholar studying generative AI from a digital humanities perspective, focusing on archives, media ecologies, and critical data studies.
Collaborators
Ryan Heuser
Ryan Heuser is Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities, working on abstraction in literary history and the aesthetic stuckness of LLM outputs.
Aline Guillermet
Aline Guillermet is a Research Associate and Affiliated Lecturer at Cambridge Digital Humanities. She works at the intersection of art history and philosophy, with a focus on human machine creativity in computational media arts and digital visual cultures.
Former Visitors
Marta Pizzagalli (Lugano)
Marta Pizzagalli is a PhD researcher at USI Lugano working on comparative literature, intermediality, and the visual apparatuses embedded in literary texts.
Adrien Jeanrenaud (Geneva)
Adrien Jeanrenaud is a PhD student at the University of Geneva in the Visual Contagions project. His research examines the globalisation of images since 1945, especially through film posters, combining archival research, digital image analysis, computer vision, and visual culture.
External Members Supervised by Leonardo Impett
Ludovica Schaerf (Zürich) Ludovica Schaerf is a PhD student in Digital Visual Studies between the Max Planck Society and the University of Zurich. Her research focuses on computer vision, AI art, digital art history, and the interpretation of latent spaces in generative models, with a background in informatics and digital humanities.
Clay Foye (Zürich)
Clay Foye is a PhD student at the University of Zürich working on the epistemologies of multimodal AI models, knowledge representation, and mechanistic interpretability. His research examines the relationship between internal model representations and their external textual and visual representations, asking how multimodality and interfaces shape what AI systems can be said to know.
Annalena Alber (Zürich)
Annalena Alber is a PhD student at the University of Zürich studying changing relationships between image and text in travel and mountaineering literature. Using historical corpora alongside vision-language models, her research examines how visual and textual meaning is co-created across languages, audiences, and centuries of technological change.
Albina Toumarkine (PSL)
Albina Toumarkine is a PhD student at the École Pratique des Hautes Études – PSL working on the historical integration of photography into museum practices, focusing on the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Her research combines archival study with computer vision and multimodal methods to examine how photographic collections were assembled, classified, reproduced, and circulated, and how computational analysis can reveal their underlying institutional and epistemic structures.
Samuel Driver (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Samuel Driver is a Schmidt Sciences AI & the Humanities Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Visiting Scholar at Brown University. His research examines historical photographic manipulation and its relationship to contemporary AI, using computer vision to study manipulation across museum collections while critically analysing the visual ideologies of the models doing the looking.
Contact
Please see the Bibliotheca Hertziana website (link above).