Roland Meyer

I am a media and visual culture scholar interested in the history, theory, and aesthetics of #operativeimages. Among other stuff, I have written on the (pre-)history of #facialrecognition & its contemporary implications.
Currently, I am an assistant professor for digital arts and cultures at the University of Zurich and the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK)

Website: https://digitalculturesandarts.ch
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/bildoperationen

Last Notes

2026-09-01 10:34:14 GMT

Save the date: Am 22. Oktober kommt Simon Strick nach Zürich, um sein neues Buch «Faschisierung. Fluchtlinie des Digitalen» vorzustellen! https://www.zentrumkuensteundkulturtheorie.ch/veranstaltungen/aktuell/?n=faschisierung-fluchtlinie-des-digitalen

2026-08-15 06:53:29 GMT

Das Programm von «Alerta», der «Konferenz zum Faschismus der Gegenwart und Möglichkeiten des Widerstands» im Rahmen des Steirischen Herbstes in Graz, 16.10.–18.10., ist jetzt online! Mit Beiträgen u.a. von Paul Feigelfeld, Orit Halpern, Anna Kraher, Clara Mattei, Simon Strick, Natascha Strobl und yours truly …https://www.steirischerherbst.at/de/program/events/9151/forum-stadtpark-konferenz-zum-faschismus-der-gegenwart-und-moeglichkeiten-des

2026-08-05 10:02:40 GMT

This image has been widely shared on social media as a document of the human tragedy that has unfolded in Ceuta and an indictment of the EU's murderous border regime in the Mediterranean. The problem is: It's AI-generated. It has a SynthID watermark, as can easily be checked with OpenAI's Verify tool for example
1/
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/117/042/321/894/423/725/original/2cf0dafd2d61c109.png

2026-07-25 10:00:33 GMT

Ideologically, generative AI is a 19th century technology: the flawed dream that once you have assembled a supposedly total archive of culture via technical media, you can use it to statistically derive new meaning from patterns of the past

2026-07-06 17:08:28 GMT

Slop ist überall. Vor allem auf Tiktok. Die fünfte und vorletzte Folge von #Slopaganda, meiner Online-Kolumne für die @npub10an…d358, handelt von «AI Fruit Drama» und davon, dass auch vermeintlich rein kommerzieller #Slop keineswegs unpolitisch ist: «Reaktionäre Muster»
https://www.woz.ch/kolumnen/2026/07/06/slopaganda-reaktionaere-muster

2026-05-19 10:47:30 GMT

I hear critical positions towards so-called «artificial intelligence» nowadays framed more and more as «rejectionism», and this is especially formulated as a critique of the left. The argument often goes something like this: Rather than seeing the potentials of AI, the left merely rejects it. «Rejectionism» thus is framed as an unwillingness to engage with the technology. But nothing could be further from the truth. Left-wing critique of AI, which takes many forms, is based on an empirical assessment of the impact and implications of the dominant model of AI development.
1/

2026-05-16 13:23:19 GMT

- reply

#Slop is the naturalization of a world built from the large-scale extraction, circulation, and endless recycling of dead human labor as platformized, formatted content. It is the automated ideology of platform capitalism.
4/

2026-05-16 13:22:49 GMT

- reply

To call #Slop automated is not to say it is free of human labor — rather, this human labor is already embedded in automated chains of operations, not only made machine-like and subsumed under the logic of algorithmic curation, but made machine-readable, dissolved into patterns and quantifiable reactions
3/

2026-05-16 13:21:37 GMT

- reply

Understood as ideology, slop is largely devoid of specific content; or rather, its main message lies in its platformized formats, which can be filled by mostly arbitrary and exchangeable content. The aim of slop is less to indoctrinate than to naturalize a world fully mediated and governed by digital platforms, a world that knows no outside of the endless feedback loops of platform capitalism
2/

2026-05-16 13:21:03 GMT

Some theses on #Slop (a thread):
Slop is automated ideology. It's content made of content, optimized for circulation, prompted, shaped, and refined through feedback loops of adaptation to platform conditions. Slop is what you get when the conditions of content distribution — the recommendation algorithms, reaction economies, and monetization schemes of social media — feed directly, continuously and automatically back into content production
1/

2026-03-26 06:08:15 GMT

OpenAI's sudden discontinuation of its video model #Sora, just a few months after a spectacular deal with Disney, shows just how little these AI companies care about their so-called products. AI video apps, to quote @npub1y6g…jdtj Steyerl, are «onboarding tools» — their purpose is more ideological than commercial.
Rather than offering revenue-generating services (OpenAI is burning money with every single Sora generated clip), these apps are designed to accustom us to a world in which so-called generative AI seems inevitable — and to provide investors with impressive demonstrations of these models' performance.
In other words, companies like OpenAI do not develop consumer products; they merely launch demos that can be retracted once they have fulfilled their purpose. Never mind that, in the meantime, they are flooding our media landscape with a deluge of #slop and destroying entire cultural sectors in the process.

2026-01-30 17:52:48 GMT

Annika Brockschmidt beschreibt in diesem erschütternden Artikel das Ausmass, in dem US-Regierungsaccounts Neo-Nazi-Content verbreiten. Ich durfte auch meine Einschätzungen beitragen https://www.volksverpetzer.de/analyse/us-regierung-neo-nazi-content/

2025-10-24 17:10:34 GMT

There is a growing, deeply problematic tendency to use #AISlop for political education. One recent example from Germany is landtagswahl.ai, which follows the motto: «Hey AI, who should I vote for?» What is typical here is that AI is not only addressed as a pseudo-person but also as a kind of impartial judge. A thread
1/
https://www.landtagswahl.ai

2025-06-07 05:55:05 GMT

- reply

There are many reasons why AI slop has become the aesthetic of current digital fascism, but one may lie in the competitive and selective logic of AI training itself: GenAI amplifies the presence of those who are already highly visible while rendering invisible those who are already marginalized. AI image generation ultimately fuses mediocrity with power – it's the aesthetic and political triumph of the ordinary and predictable. While it's non-exclusive in terms of use (anyone can generate images) it's highly exclusionary in terms of representation, making it the perfect tool for crowd-sourced propaganda and #memefascism,
3/3

2025-06-07 05:53:25 GMT

- reply

The aim of this latest portrait, however, seems to be to fuse a classic form of presidential representation with the memeified version of himself that Trump has become: memes turning into ‹reality› (as in ‹reality television›), in the form of fascist branding distributed by the official White House channels. That might actually be the one thing Trump understands about both meme culture and AI image generation: it's all about brand recognition. Trump is a perfect AI meme because he's already so pervasive in digital visual culture. In a way, he's been working for decades to be a major factor in every training dataset.
2/3
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/114/640/525/131/452/778/original/95f71e5397f64e52.jpg

2025-06-07 05:49:49 GMT

As some have already noticed, Trump's latest official portrait bears a striking resemblance to the aesthetic of #aislop. In particular, his shirt and tie display an almost otherworldly glow and a painterly slickness so typical to many AI image generators. This to me is further evidence of how integral AI has become to Trump's brand. Of course, every official portrait of Trump has been an exercise in branding – the last one, released at his inauguration in January, visibly attempted to recreate the famous mugshot that had already become a key element of the iconography of MAGA merchandise.
1/3
https://tldr.nettime.org/system_nettime/media_attachments/files/114/640/505/096/581/542/original/a757dde5e13da874.jpg

2025-03-17 07:50:33 GMT

Für die Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung habe ich über die aktuellen Lösch- und Zensurkampagnen in den USA und über die veränderte Rolle digitaler Bildarchive angesichts generativer KI geschrieben – und darüber, warum Datensicherung jetzt das Gebot der Stunde ist. Wir brauchen Gegenarchive! https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/wo-us-behoerden-archivbilder-von-minderheiten-loeschen-110354085.html