Visualization has become a key tool through which contemporary society understands and negotiates reality. From algorithmic image generation and CGI to forensic reconstructions, and data visualizations - renderings of the otherwise imperceptible increasingly mediates the way we access information. This workshop aims to examine visualization as a critical aesthetic and epistemic operation far from neutral representation. It asks how visual practices produce knowledge of social realities that are structured by processes of abstraction, such as financial systems, computational infrastructures, surveillance technologies, ecological networks, or global logistics.

As part of the SNSF project Real Abstractions: Reconsidering Realism's Role for the Present, our workshop brings together perspectives from media studies, visual culture, artistic research, and critical theory. By investigating how artistic and theoretical practices engage with the challenge of rendering abstract social relations perceptible, we seek to rethink realism for an age in which the most consequential dimensions of reality are often too complex to be directly seen and hence need to be visualized.