Katrina Sluis is Associate Professor and Head of Photography & Media Arts in the School of Art & Design at the Australian National University, where she also co-convenes the Computational Culture Lab. Her research and curatorial practice explore the changing social, cultural and political life of photography under conditions of computation, with particular interests in networked images, computer vision, photographic datasets and generative AI.

She is co-author, with Andrew Dewdney, of The Networked Image in Post-Digital Culture (Routledge), which examines how the networked image challenges established ways of understanding photography, museums and visual culture. Her current research investigates the transformation of photographs into data infrastructures, including the histories and visual cultures of photographic datasets used in computer vision and AI.

Prior to joining ANU, Katrina was Senior Lecturer and founding Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (CSNI) at London South Bank University. The Centre brought together researchers across cultural studies, software studies, art and media practice to investigate how network culture transforms the production, circulation and interpretation of images and cultural objects. Its collaborative research partnerships included Rhizome, Tate, The Photographers’ Gallery, Serpentine Galleries, the Royal College of Art and Gasworks.

From 2011–2019, Katrina held the inaugural post of Senior Curator (Digital Programmes) at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, where she developed artistic, curatorial and public programmes concerned with machine vision, synthetic imaging, network culture and speculative photographic education. She commissioned and worked with artists including James Bridle, Morehshin Allahyari, Erica Scourti, Jonas Lund and Alan Warburton. Major projects included Unthinking Photography, Post-Capitalist Photography Now! (with Ben Burbridge), All I Know Is What’s on the Internet, and Jonas Lund: Operation Earnest Voice. She continues her relationship with The Photographers’ Gallery as Adjunct Research Curator.

Katrina serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of Photographies (Routledge) and Media:Art:Write (Open Humanities Press), and on the Board of PhotoAccess, the ACT’s centre for contemporary photography and media arts. 

PhD (Sunderland), MA (UAL), PGCHE (LSBU), BFA (Hons) (UNSW)

My research examines the politics and aesthetics of photography, contemporary art and reproduction in computational culture. I am particularly interested in how networked and computational technologies transform the production, circulation and cultural value of images, and how these transformations complicate established understandings of authorship, spectatorship and curating. Methodologically, I bring photographic theory and histories of vernacular and everyday image making into conversation with contemporary developments in computer vision, machine learning and generative AI.

A recurring concern in my work is the increasingly ambiguous status of the photograph as both cultural representation and computational object: something created, circulated and interpreted by humans, but also increasingly classified, processed and made operational by machines.

A further strand of my research considers museums and galleries as sites in which computational culture is negotiated, interpreted and contested. My work has examined emerging forms of human–machine curation, data analytics and audience measurement, the documentation and reproduction of digital art, and the migration of concepts and practices between art institutions and computer science.

Working across critical writing, curating and practice-based research, I am interested in experimental methods for studying computational image cultures, and in the possibilities of museums, exhibitions and public programming as sites for collaborative critical inquiry.