As computational systems increasingly shape how images are produced, classified, and circulated, questions of authorship have shifted from abstract debate to material concern. Contemporary image-making now routinely involves algorithmic processes that mediate visibility before an image is encountered, complicating long-held assumptions about intention, agency, and responsibility. These questions formed the focus of a recent panel discussion presented in conjunction with the Courtauld Institute of Art’s East Wing Biennale, a programme historically associated with practices that interrogate aesthetic, political, and institutional structures.
The panel brought together artists whose practices approached authorship from distinct positions. Yet it was
Camilla Ridgers’ contribution that provided the conceptual framework through which the discussion cohered. Rather than treating technology as either a neutral tool or an autonomous creative force, Ridgers framed computational systems as organising structures—systems that shape how images are generated, abstracted, and interpreted before they reach the viewer. This structural emphasis redirected the conversation away from surface aesthetics toward the underlying conditions that govern image-making in a computational era.
Ridgers described a working method that begins with rule-based and generative processes capable of producing visual permutations beyond her immediate control. These outputs are not presented as resolved digital images. Instead, they function as provisional material, carrying distortions and errors that are deliberately retained as the work is translated into painting and drawing by hand. In this process, authorship is neither relinquished to automation nor asserted as mastery. It is redistributed across stages of mediation, revealing the limits of systemised interpretation while foregrounding the artist’s responsibility within those constraints. Authorship, as Ridgers articulated it, operates less as an expression of control than as a condition negotiated through structure
Other panel contributions entered into dialogue with this framework. Kelly Wu’s practice engages memory and cultural inheritance through sculpture, installation, performance, and personal archives. Drawing on lived experience, Wu complicates narrative access by withholding meaning through guarded and opaque forms. Themes of race, gender, and class recur, shaped by strategies of concealment as much as disclosure. In Wu’s work, authorship emerges as partial and unstable—constructed through what remains inaccessible as much as what is revealed.
William Lowry approached authorship through devotional and apocalyptic image traditions. Working across prints, drawings, sculpture, and installation, Lowry examined how private feeling becomes organised into public iconography. Anonymous figures—soldiers, athletes, workers, lovers—appear suspended between vulnerability and performance, staged within monumental settings referencing visionary and futurist architectures. Here, authorship operates through the construction of shared mythologies, tracing how individual experience is absorbed into collective visual languages shaped by histories of belief, power, and progress.
Read alongside these positions, Ridgers’ contribution functioned as a conceptual anchor. Where Wu foregrounded memory and concealment, and Lowry examined symbolic transmission and belief, Ridgers addressed the systemic conditions that precede representation itself. Her intervention allowed the discussion to move beyond individual practices toward a broader examination of how authorship is relocated within computational, cultural, and institutional systems.
The Courtauld East Wing Biennale provided an apt context for this inquiry. Long associated with artists who challenge dominant modes of image production, the programme framed the panel as an examination of how images accrue meaning within structures that exceed individual authorship. Within this setting, Ridgers’ contribution operated not as a personal statement but as a methodological proposition—offering a way to think through authorship at a moment when images are increasingly shaped by automated classification and abstraction.
What emerged from the discussion was neither a rejection of computational tools nor an uncritical embrace of them. Instead, the panel articulated a shared insistence on responsibility within image-making. Computation was understood as a powerful but limited participant, shaped by the values embedded in its design and deployment. By foregrounding mediation, translation, and material decision-making, Ridgers’ framework reframed authorship as an ongoing negotiation rather than a fixed position.
As images continue to circulate through increasingly complex technological infrastructures, the questions raised at the Courtauld panel suggest a shift in how authorship is understood within contemporary art. Rather than asserting mastery over systems or retreating into material nostalgia, the practices discussed point toward a recalibrated model of authorship—one attentive to structure, constraint, and the conditions under which images are now produced and understood.
