This issue explores how artificial intelligence, as both a technological and cultural practice, reshapes power, visibility, and social relations in digital societies.

Artificial Intelligence is not only a technological innovation, but a cultural practice shaped by social, historical, and political contexts. AI systems reflect human values and power relations, reinforcing cultural norms and ideologies. Through algorithmic monitoring and automated decision-making, they operate as mechanisms of social control embedding bias, sustaining dominance, and creating new visibilities. This issue examines how AI-mediated surveillance reshapes knowledge, accountability, and marginalization within digital societies, focusing on platform capitalism, the economic precarity and exploitation of clickworkers in the Global South, biometric control, and the commodification of social behavior.

Autorentext

Ramón Reichert (Dr. phil. habil.) teaches and researches as a senior researcher at the Department of Cultural Studies at the Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. Previously, he taught and researched in Basel, Berlin, Canberra, Fribourg, Helsinki, Sankt Gallen, Stockholm and Zurich and was EU project coordinator for many years. His current research project 'Visual Politics and Protest. Artistic Research Project on the visual framing of the Russia-Ukraine War on internet portals and social media' (2022-2024) deals with the visual politics of violence, conflict and resistance. ---