»Statistical Zoom« – Gastvortrag von Tomáš Dvořák (FAMU, Prague) zur KI und Fotografiegeschichte

The talk will introduce the concept and genealogy of the »statistical zoom«, an imaginary apparatus for transitioning between different levels of generality and for visualising the passages from the concrete to the abstract, from the particular to the universal. It will focus on the emergence of the statistical zoom in the late nineteenth century with the conceptual and practical merging of photography and statistics (in the works of, e.g. Francis Galton or Gabriel Tarde) and propose to understand current technologies of generative artificial intelligence, based on (the automation of) statistical inductive inference, as the latest embodiment of such a medium.