SANTOS. L. P. Between the Visible and the Invisible Towards a Cosmotechnics of Vision Technologies. VISAP Viena, 2025.

We live in an era where images are no longer understood merelyas representations of the world but have become active agents inshaping everyday experiences. Produced and operated by digitaldevices within continuous informational networks, numericalimages establish a saturated visual regime in which everything canbe recorded, shared, and archived, yet not all attain the samedegree of visibility or symbolic density. Vision technologies,while expanding the field of the visible, simultaneously reaffirmpractices of hyperexposure and reinforce historical inequalities inthe distribution of visibility.These images classify, hierarchize, and guide automateddecision-making by feeding algorithms constructed fromdatabases. Far from neutral, these databases are predominantlyformed within hypermediated urban contexts, intersected byspecific cultural, economic, and territorial demarcations.Consequently, certain modes of life becomehypervisible—repeatedly performed across networks—whileothers remain systematically rendered invisible. The algorithmic production of vision, therefore, not only reproduces inequalitiesbut stabilizes them as enduring patterns.In Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You) (2021),Trevor Paglen reveals how computer vision systems—oftenperceived as technical or objective—operate mechanisms of socialcontrol and exclusion based on restricted visual repertoires. Hisalgorithms reproduce racial, affective, and behavioralcategorizations, contributing to a surveillance regime whereabsence of representation equates to absence of recognition.In light of this, the present article proposes an inquiry into themorphogenesis of data that structures contemporary regimes ofvisibility, with a focus on the collective construction of digitalimagination and memory. The central question—how do we teachmachines to see?—unfolds into a fundamental corollary: how dowe come to be seen by them?Within this framework, collective care emerges as anethical-aesthetic principle and political strategy to subvert thelogic of algorithmic homogenization. Reconfiguring databasesthrough situated epistemologies and dissident narratives is agesture of resistance against systematic invisibility. It entailsimagining alternative modes of encoding the world—and,consequently, inhabiting it.Drawing on the concept of cosmotechnics, as formulated by YukHui (2016) to describe the articulation between forms of life andmodes of technical production, this article proposes an expansionof the notion as a practice of care for possible futures inscribedwithin technical images. As a case study, we analyze TrevorPaglen’s Invisible Images, which critically exposes the limits anddangers of the algorithmic culture. Ultimately, to ask how weteach machines to see is to question what cosmos we bequeath tosystems that today regulate perception, action, and collectiveimagination. What is being forgotten? Who remains outside thefield of technical visuality? And what does it mean to imagine acommon future from partial, colonial, and metropolitan archives?