Are some things (still) unrepresentable?, w. Thao Phan
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Tuesday 10 February 2026, 4pm-5:00pm
Arts West, Research Lounge (Level 5, room 552)
University of Melbourne (Parkville campus)
“Are some things unrepresentable?” asks a 2011 essay by Alexander Galloway. It responds to a similarly titled, earlier text by the philosopher Jacques Rancière examining the impossibility of representing political violence, with the Shoah as its anchor point. How, or how much political violence, asks Ranciére, can be represented? What visual modes, asks Galloway, can be used to represent the unrepresentable? In this talk, I examine two contemporary artistic projects that deal with the problem of representation in the age of artificial intelligence: Exhibit AI created by the law firm Maurice Blackburn and Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Power and Technology, 1500-2025 by artists and researchers Kate Crawford and Vladen Joler. I discuss the recent turn to AI as the medium through which to address political violence, exploring how AI images are operationalised as engines of political representation at the same time as they are said to no longer function as indexical objects. Following the talk, Thao will be joined in conversation by André Dao.
Thao Phan is a feminist science and technology studies (STS) researcher who specialises in the study of gender and race in algorithmic culture. She is a DECRA Fellow and Lecturer in Sociology (STS) in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University. Thao has published on topics including whiteness and the aesthetics of AI, big-data-driven techniques of racial classification, and the commercial capture of AI ethics research. She is the Co-Founder and President of AusSTS—Australia’s largest network for STS scholars.
André Dao is a research fellow with the ARC Laureate Program on Global Corporations and International Law at the Melbourne Law School. His research focusses on the intersections between international human rights law and digital data technologies. He is also a creative writer of fiction and non-fiction.
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