What does it mean to inhabit a computational world-turned-image? When photographs no longer capture but composite, when renders replace recordings, when machine vision dictates what is permitted, and when synthetic media generates realities untethered from any physical referent – how do we understand vision, identity, and presence?

For the 17th edition of tactics&practice, Aksioma's discursive programme exploring contemporary investigative art, society, and new technologies, Becoming Image examines the transformation of recent digital images from representational surfaces into operational environments. The programme investigates how computational photography, machine vision, CGI, and generative AI have fundamentally altered the ontological status of the image – no longer a window onto the world, but a world unto itself.

Images have always mediated reality. But today, shaped by algorithmic processes and machinic ways of seeing, they do more than represent – they perform, classify, and decide. They actively construct the world we inhabit, they generate the identities we assume, they replace human vision and perception with machine analysis and interpretation.

Beneath their surfaces, images are operational: optimised for pattern recognition, object detection, and automated inference. They are made by machines, for machines, circulating through pipelines where human perception is merely incidental. In this landscape, the rendered image becomes a tool of classification rather than depiction, designed to fit within the expectations of training data and surveillance systems. What regimes of truth emerge when images no longer refer back to physical referents but generate their own?

Becoming Image traces how subjects navigate, resist, and conform to these new image-worlds. As synthetic media proliferates – from deepfakes to AI-generated avatars, from computational portraits to photorealistic game environments – the boundaries between capturing and compositing ourselves dissolve. Identity is no longer simply represented by images; it is actively shaped, trained, and co-produced through them. Bodies begin to choreograph themselves to match algorithmic rules of machine vision and the computational aesthetics of generative AI.

Taking place across various venues in Ljubljana in 2026, this year's edition of tactics&practice includes a series of exhibitions, artist talks, workshops, and screenings, bringing together artists whose practices are embedded within the very software stacks that animate digital bodies, govern machine perception and implement image regimes. Rather than positioning themselves outside computational imaging, these artists work from within – reappropriating the logics of rendering and detection, exploiting compositional errors, and inhabiting the feedback loops between physical and virtual bodies.

What new subjectivities emerge when identity is co-produced with imaging systems? What political and economic functions – but also affective and emotional dimensions – do we inhabit in a world increasingly mediated by computational vision? If images once offered windows onto reality, they now offer environments to enter, agents to negotiate with, and identities to become.

Becoming Image asks what it means to see, to be seen, and to become visible when every act of seeing is already mediated by software – and when the distinction between image and world has begun to collapse.

The programme will be published soon. Stay tuned!