When the Digital Image Fails: Metadata, Material Encounters, and Indigenous Knowledge Practices
Thursday, 16 April 2026
15:30
STIAS, Library
Abstract
This talk and paper propose a critical reflection on the status of the digital image in contemporary new media culture. More than a visual representation, the digital image is often understood as a repository in a database logic (Manovich, 2002): a data package that can store layers of information, metadata, and contextual traces. Within this framework, digital images carry the promise of accuracy, functioning as reliable documentation of practices, objects, and situations. The digital image appears as a technological guarantee of truth, aligned with theoretical discussions that treat digital media not only as aesthetic surfaces but also as informational systems that shape how knowledge is produced and preserved.
However, this promise is placed in friction through the research approaches of three Indigenous Brazilian scholars and artists: Glicéria Tupinambá, Francy Baniwa, and Irineu Terena. Their work challenges the idea of the digital image as a trustworthy archive of cultural meaning. Tupinambá confronts museum digitizations of Indigenous artifacts in European collections, showing how embodied and spiritual engagement with objects reveals traces that no photograph can fully capture. Baniwa critiques the instability of metadata (tags, keywords, and classifications) demonstrating how archival descriptions often fail when removed from Indigenous cultural frameworks. Terena, in turn, shifts attention away from the image itself, emphasizing manual transmission (in presence, not virtual) of knowledge through the revival of ceramic techniques in his community. Together, these perspectives expose the decay of the promise of digital images as a necessarily reliable documentation tool, the limits of digital veracity (Drucker, 2020) and resonate with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s notion of “controlled equivocation,” (2004) suggesting that relations between cultures and Indigenous epistemologies cannot be reduced to direct translation or transparent documentation.
Biography
Bruno Moreschi is an artistic researcher and Associate Professor in New Media at Aalto University, Finland (from 2026). He holds a PhD in Arts from the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), including a research period at Uniarts Helsinki, and received the CAPES Award for Best Thesis in the Arts. His research examines the deconstruction of systems and the decoding of institutional and technological procedures within art spaces, museum collections, visual culture, and digital technologies. Moreschi has held research positions at several institutes for advanced study, including the Leuphana University Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS), Collegium Helveticum at ETH Zurich, Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, the University of São Paulo, C4AI Inova USP, and the University of Cambridge. His projects have been supported and exhibited by institutions such as ZKM, the Volkswagen Foundation, the Van Abbemuseum, the São Paulo Biennial, FAPESP, SESC, Rumos Itaú Cultural, Funarte, and the Bauhaus Fellowship. He has extensive experience organizing artistic and research residencies and workshops, notably through the Center for Arts, Design and Social Research (CAD+SR), and collaborates in international research initiatives including Decay Without Mourning: Thinking Heritage Practices, where he works with Indigenous researchers to explore digital tools for critically engaging with museum collections. His work has been published in journals including AI & Society, New Media & Society, International Journal of Heritage Studies, and ARTMargins, and he currently develops experimental methodologies aimed at critically “(un)training” computer vision systems, drawing on conceptual art and critical pedagogy.