A collaboration between the M.Des program in Visual Communication, Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, and Goethe-Institute Israel’s residency program in Jerusalem.

The event will include three short lectures and a conversation moderated by Dr. Hagit Keysar.

Robin Coenen | «Design Power(s) Knowledge» — Prototypes as a Tool for Dialog and Transformation

In his talk, Robin Coenen explores how design operates not merely as a representational medium, but as a generative mode of inquiry — a way of thinking through making. Drawing from projects developed within his practice Visual Intelligence, he demonstrates how critical visualization, civic technology, and cartographic methods operate as prototyping processes which can produce new, situated forms of knowledge. The talk proposes that information design’s power to create new knowledge lies in its capacity to sense, structure, and reconfigure the relations between data, people, and infrastructures.

Mira Anneli Naß | Operative Images in Artistic Practice

Since the early 2000s, artists and scholars have focused on apparatus-based images emerging from military, industrial, and scientific contexts—recordings from surveillance systems, facial recognition imagery, strategic maps, 3D simulations, or forensic and algorithmic visualization processes. For these image forms, the term “operational images” (Harun Farocki) has become established. This talk presents the concept of the operational image, which has gained remarkable traction as an analytical category, and examines artistic practices that appropriate operational images primarily as a means to critique state surveillance and economic control mechanisms.

Anat Ben-David | Counter-Visions: The Right to See Otherwise
As artificial intelligence systems increasingly classify, caption, and circulate images, they shape not only what is seen but how meaning itself is produced. This lecture explores the emergence of counter-visions, acts of resistance that reclaim interpretation from algorithmic regimes of visibility. Through examples from climate imagery and platform infrastructures, it traces how human and collective interventions open space for alternative readings, expose what remains unseen, and restore ethical and political depth to data. In doing so, the lecture argues for the right to see otherwise: the collective capacity to question, reinterpret, and repoliticize the visual world shaped by AI.

About the speakers

Robin Coenen, Based in Berlin, is an information designer working at the intersection of design, science, technology, and visual anthropology. In 2020, Robin co-founded the design studio Visual Intelligence together with sociologist and designer Danielle Rosales. The studio explores the visual articulation of complex artistic, social, and technological systems. In 2025, he co-founded conQrete Tech, a computer-vision startup bridging artificial intelligence and information design. Since 2021, he has been a research associate in the Class for Information Design at the University of the Arts Berlin.

Mira Anneli Naß received her PhD in 2025, with a study on Operational Images in the Field of Art as Surveillance Critique after 9/11. From 2019 to 2024, she was a research associate in the Department of Art History and Aesthetic Theory at the University of Bremen. Afterward, she worked as a research associate in the project Antisemitism on documenta fifteen and in the Art World at the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences. In November and December 2025, she is a Minerva Fellow at the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Anat Ben David is Associate Professor of Communication at the Open University of Israel.  Her research examines the intersections of digital media, memory, and politics, with a focus on social media, web archives, and the infrastructures that shape online knowledge. Ben-David employs digital and computational methods to study how platforms mediate collective memory, historical narratives, and sociotechnical power.

The event will be held in English.

Duration: 120 minutes

Admission: Free

Image:

Interface view from the Poliscope editor: Prototype for enabling critical annotation of museum collection data. Cooperation with: Stadtmuseum Berlin. © Danielle Rosales, Robin Coenen | Visual Intelligence