4 DEGREES OF SIMULATION

This practice-led seminar explores sensing as a political and contested process of knowledge production. Across the sessions, artists, curators, and researchers will share the tools and methods they use to examine how modelling and simulation not only structure what is possible in the world, but also how these become modes of investigation and political intervention.

At stake in these practices is not only how the world is seen, but what can be seen — and by whom. Perception is shaped by the techniques and infrastructures that govern visibility and intelligibility: what appears and what is hidden, what is amplified or ignored, what is legible as knowledge and what is dismissed as noise. In turn, these divisions define whose lives are recognised, which claims are heard, and which futures can be imagined or acted upon. In this sense, the politics of sensing is inseparable from the politics of recognition, access, and power — what Jaques Rancière describes as the distribution of the sensible.

Each guest will guide us through the digital and technical environments where their practice takes place. Over four sessions, we will explore how modelling and simulation participate in organising the field of the perceptible and, in doing so, the field of the political. These practices, while distinct, share a concern with how sensing is mobilised: as a means of producing evidence, governing bodies, managing risk, or imagining futures that can interrogate our present. Whether tracing violence through counter-forensics, shaping perception through live computation, simulating planetary collapse, or animating speculative economies, each session examines how tools designed to represent reality also produce it — and how they might be repurposed as instruments of inquiry, and collective imagination.

Session I - Introduction:  Investigative Aesthetics
03 / 11 / 2025
With Júlia Nueno and Matthew Fuller
The first session introduces investigative aesthetics, developed by Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman, which combines artistic and scientific modes of sensing to produce facts and interpret reality. Fuller will outline how aesthetics operate as an epistemological practice, bringing together artistic, scientific, and technical methods to interrogate knowledge production. He will show how investigative practices mobilise sense and sense-making —images, models, maps, and data—as tools of inquiry that intervene in infrastructures of power and visibility. As a case study, Júlia will present her reconstruction of AI targeting systems in Gaza, showing how computational violence becomes legible through spatial traces and counter-forensic techniques.

Session II - Climate: Modelling Uncertainty
10 / 11 / 2025
With Lucia Rebolino
Climate modelling and electromagnetic sensing, central to Rebolino’s practice, are framed as aesthetic and political operations. Climate systems are not simply observed but modelled, parameterised, and simulated through infrastructures such as satellites, spectrum allocation, and predictive networks. This session examines how data becomes visible, which uncertainties are tolerated or erased, and how parameters like frequency, resolution, and noise encode geopolitical power. Rebolino introduces spatial computing to interrogate how environmental risk is forecasted, collapse imagined, and climate framed as both governance object and site of struggle. Modelling emerges not only as science but as a practice organising planetary conditions.

Session III – Body: Politics of Real Time
17 / 11 / 2025
With Farzin Lotfi-Jam
From medical imaging and biometric scanning to predictive policing and military targeting, real-time systems prioritise speed, resolution, and responsiveness—redefining how the body is sensed, simulated, and governed. Drawing on his research at the Realtime Urbanism Lab, Farzin examines real-time as both a design logic and a political technology. Through case studies of digital twins, synthetic populations, and live simulations, participants will reflect on how the body is continuously processed by infrastructures of prediction—and what it means to inhabit a world that is always “in computation”.

Session IV – Market: Speculation and the Politics of Imagination
24 / 11 / 2025
With Bahar Noorizadeh
Speculation, in Bahar Noorizadeh’s work, is both a financial practice and a political, imaginative act. Her films trace how economies are imagined—from the technological optimism of cybernetic socialism to the algorithmic abstraction of finance capitalism. Through screenings and discussion, participants will explore speculative aesthetics, particularly animation, as a way to unsettle dominant narratives and model alternative imaginaries. For Noorizadeh, speculation is never neutral: it reveals the forces shaping the present while opening space to rethink historical justice, economic life, and futurity. Speculation then becomes both a lens of critique and a method of invention.