OPENING LECTURE / 13 October 2025 / 10:00 - 10:30
Waste and the Image: The Lure of (Im)materiality, from Celluloid to AI slop
Matilde Nardelli
Associate Professor at University of West London (UK)
The anthropologist Mary Douglas famously claimed in her 1966 book Purity and Danger that ‘dirt is matter out of place’. Can the same be said of waste? Or does waste – even when ‘out of place’ – remain waste, unless rescued by some kind of transformation succeeding in turning its matter into something else? What happens when that matter is the ‘matter’ of the image – including, in our times, digital images and so-called AI slop?
Through a tour of examples from cinema, photography, contemporary art and vernacular media, my talk will explore these questions – and the wider discussions they engender about technology and the environment – by broaching the relation between the image and – and even as – waste across different technological generations.
Matilde Nardelli is Associate Professor in the School of Film, Media and Design of the University of West London. Her work addresses media aesthetics, visual culture, art cinema and artist moving image. Her essays have appeared in, among others: Screen, The Journal of Visual Culture, NECSUS, Tate Papers, Oxford Art Journal, Photographies. She is the author of Antonioni and the Aesthetics of Impurity (2020) and co-editor of Bruno Munari: The Lightness of Art (2017).
