Abstract
This talk examines how images govern, increasingly operating as techniques of control. It explores how visual systems no longer aim to represent or reveal — instead, they operate. They produce plausible realities that circulate with just enough resolution to stabilise belief and pre-empt critique. Their power lies not in what they show, but in what they do: how they redirect attention, manage feeling, and authorise action. In this regime, the image doesn’t need to make sense — it only needs to feel right. Rendering becomes a strategy of governance, where affect replaces argument, coherence is optional, and distraction becomes instrumental.
Images function not simply as representations, but as tools for managing perception — saturating vision, rerouting focus, and displacing accountability. Once circulated, the image settles into infrastructure, shaping behaviour and consequence regardless of its accuracy. This talk asks what it means to respond to images that are not representational but operational, and what forms of intervention remain when truth is no longer the image’s primary claim.
Nora O’ Murchú is an Irish curator and researcher whose work explores how digital infrastructures shape culture and politics. Her practice examines the ontology of computation — how technical systems organise power, extract value, and condition collective life. Tracing the infrastructures and interfaces that mediate relations between people, images, and technology, her work investigates how these systems produce new material, social, and affective realities.
From 2020 to 2024, she served as Artistic Director of transmediale in Berlin, where she developed a curatorial framework spanning exhibitions, publications, and public programmes. She is a Professor at the University of Limerick and is currently developing How to Read an Image, an international exhibition and research project for FACT Liverpool that examines contemporary image cultures.
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