The workshop of the AG Interfaces 2025 is dedicated to the (in)visible operations of digital interfaces and their central role in the visual practices of contemporary platform cultures. Platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, YouTube or Facebook are always situated in a political context and have changed the understanding of politics (hyperpolitics, metapolitics). They make practices appear, suggest ways of acting and attempt to regulate them in terms of infrastructure and discourse. Mechanisms of (AI-supported) content moderation, shadowbanning and the censorship of controversial content are just as much a part of this as the introduction and termination of fact-checking procedures. At the same time, however, these strategies, which often focus on the micropolitical, cannot completely rule out user activities that go beyond or against them - e.g. through jailbreaking tactics, the targeted use of hashtags or memetic text-image combinations. Platforms control visibility and invisibility through specific interface designs, coordinative algorithmic processes and data-based decision-making mechanisms; the platformization of generative AI is also based on this. Interfaces not only act as passive mediators of content, but also prove to be powerful actors in the creation, regulation, modification and contextualization of content.
However, criticism of social media interfaces is not only manifested on a theoretical level, but increasingly also through playful, tactical and subversive usage practices. Whether through targeted tests of platform functions, the deliberate circumvention of visibility algorithms or through alternative image practices - users test and question the functioning of platforms and can thus make their underlying politics visible. The workshop is dedicated to the different methods with which interface operations and platform politics can be analyzed, focusing on image forms, practices and their conditions of emergence.
Particular attention is paid to the question of how adaptive visibilities and invisibilities function under platform conditions and how visual cultures are shaped by interface operations and hardware conditions. By actively shaping processes of image creation, interfaces become central actors in media aesthetics and the political structuring of digital platforms.
Organization: Jan Distelmeyer (Potsdam), Jana Hecktor (Tübingen), Timo Kaerlein (Bochum), Roland Meyer (Zurich), Katharina Weinstock (Karlsruhe).
14:00 Welcome
14:30 - 16:00 Panel 1 “Aesthetic Politics”
Moderation: Roland Meyer (Zurich)
Lisa Rein (Weimar): Brave new world: On the assessment of aesthetics through databases of algorithmic image classification
Katharina Weinstock (Karlsruhe): Simulative Cleaning.
'Clean-Up Games', Interface Effects and Platform Policies
16:00 - 16:15 Break
16:15 - 17:45 Panel 2 “Politics of knowledge”
Moderation: Jan Distelmeyer (Potsdam)
Kim Albrecht (Essen): Artificial Worldviews
Yannick Nepomuk Fritz (Karlsruhe): “Distilling knowledge”.
On the Platform Policies of Application Programming
Programming Interfaces and the Limits of Conceptual Access to Artificial Intelligence
17:45 - 18:00 Break
18:00 - 19:30 Panel 3 “Politics and Economics”
Moderation: Katharina Weinstock (Karlsruhe)
Konstantin Haensch (Hildesheim): From Surface to Strategy: The 'Brand Interface' and Its Political Economy in Platform Cultures
Evening program: tba
20:00 Dinner together
Taumi - Asia Fusion Lorenzstraße 29
9:15 - 9:45 Review of the discussions
9:45 - 10:00 Break
10:00 - 11:30 Panel 4 “API policies”
Moderation: Timo Kaerlein (Bochum)
Tatjana Seitz (Siegen): Critical technical API studies: A practice-oriented investigation of interfaces
Pierre Depaz (Karlsruhe): Pirate Programming Interfaces: Hijacking the stream
11:45 - 13:00 Roundtable
from 13:00 Option for a joint “closing lunch”
