AI Framing the Future - The Visual Script That Makes Violence Feel Inevitable

What happens when images don’t just imagine the future—but create the conditions to make it happen? We invite you to a round table discussion on the concept of speculative violence, developed by researcher Donatella Della Ratta as part of her ongoing project exploring how AI-generated imagery is reshaping our perception of the future—and, in turn, subtly guiding our actions in the present. 

This research project, supported by the Italian Council 2024-25, focuses on how visualizing scenarios that are not (yet) real, but remain possible and plausible, can trigger forms of violence in the here and now. When synthetic images depict future harm—displacement, erasure, destruction—they can start to feel inevitable, dulling political urgency and reorienting public perception.

A striking example is Donald Trump’s AI-generated vision of Gaza as a seaside resort: a sleek, sanitized future that, despite its absurdity or provocation, begins to normalize the logic of erasure and settler fantasy. What begins as digital speculation enters the public imagination—quietly making future violence thinkable, even acceptable.

In this reversal of photography’s traditional role—from recording memory to planting imagined futures—AI becomes a prophetic visual tool. But when these visions are politically engineered, what are the consequences for collective agency, historical accountability, and resistance?

Join us for a critical conversation at the intersection of aesthetics, ethics, and politics—to interrogate how images shape what we believe is possible, and how imagination itself can turn both into a site of vulnerability and a space for resistance.

Supported by: Italian Council and Direzione Generale Creativitá Contemporanea.