UPCOMING 2026
Title: The Image Tactics of Black Holes: Moving Photographs Beyond Data
Conference Presentation
Location: at College Art Association, New York, February 2026
Panel Title: (Methodological) Black Holes in Photography
Absract: By most counts, the image published by the Event Horizon Telescope of a black hole is not a photograph. Part of what has made black holes undiscoverable, beyond their being at twenty-six thousand light years from Earth is that they are understood to swallow rather than emanate light, with patterns in light’s absence making them discoverable. What makes the black hole photograph an image at all might be an equally pressing question, given that the volume of data transmission their observation requires, currently assessed at sixty-four gigabits per second at speeds that exceed earlier interferometric systems ninety-thousand-fold. The black hole photo is not just of a theoretically hyperbolic object, it also is a supermassive entity itself—of data. Drawing on the so-called Beckenstein entropy bound on information, according to which the maximum amount of data that can be put in a volume is framed in terms of a black hole, this paper considers black holes as expanding the imaginary of data to off-world frontiers in response to a crisis in both the perceived sustainability of data and its intelligibility to human perception. It looks at work by artists seeking to subvert data-saturated systems by targeting their inner propensities toward forgetting, rot, and decay, such as Hito Steyerl’s notion of impoverished images, Linda Dounia Rebeiz’s synthesis of non-existent memories, and Mimi Ọnụọha’s filling of “blank [sic] holes” with missing data. Black holes are thus presented as both hyperbolic and tactical in image theory.
Archived Events
This page archives the presentations, lectures, and research seminars by team members on black holes, black boxes, and their photographic histories, thus celebrating scientific, artistic, and cultural engagement with some of the most fascinating objects in our universe.
What is a Photograph?
Historical entanglements of light and sound
Our inaugural lecture of the Black Hole Photography Lecture Series started on Wednesday June 11, 2025 Time: 11-12 Location: Large Lecture Hall, Erjavčeva ulica 23., ALUO, Univerza v Ljubljani, Ljubljana 1000
Speaker: Jennifer Marine, MA,
University of Virginia, Art History
“In 2019, astronomers captured the now-iconic image of black hole M87—a photograph unlike any other. Made with no camera or film, how can such an image still be called a photograph?” Join us for a thought-provoking exploration of the fluid boundaries between photography and scientific imaging. This talk traces a fascinating arc from Margaret Watts-Hughes’s “Voice Figures” and Robert Williams Wood’s sound wave photography, to the radio-based imaging of deep space, interrogating the very definition of a photograph. Discover how light and sound have long been entangled in the visual history of science and art—blurring categories, challenging conventions, and reshaping how we see (and hear) the world.
Ljubljana, 11 June, 2025
Photos from the Lecture
moderated by dr. Eszter Polonyi
moderated by dr. Eszter Polonyi
Data Black Holes Versus Data Clouds:
Notes from the Extradata Era
Sreda, 24 september 2025 Time: 12.30–12.50. Location: Avditorij Narodne galerije, Ljubljana 1000 The lecture is part of the Sixth International Scientific Conference of the Department of Theoretical Sciences, UL ALUO
Asist. dr. Eszter Polonyi, UL FMF, UL ALUO, Kunstuniversität Linz
In 2005, two concerned civilians filed a lawsuit to shut down Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest scientific experiment designed to investigate quantum phenomena such as supersymmetry, extra dimensions, and dark matter. Their complaint was that, running at roughly 7 million times the energy per year of a single high-energy beam circulating within it, the LHC operated at energy levels that risked opening a black hole that would swallow the planet. The case was dismissed in 2008 on the basis of technical rather than scientific terms. Among the reasons given were absurdities to which the lawsuit gave rise within legal procedure, including the difficulty of finding a witness and producing a cost-benefit analysis in which the projected scientific outcomes of the experiment were measured against the future of the entire planet and “life as we know it.” Often referred to colloquially as the “doomsday lawsuit,” this case testifies to a newfound difficulty in adapting technical discourse to the planetary framework of the Anthropocene (Crutzen & Stoermer) within which the human scientific and cultural imagination has been operating over the last century.
This paper considers the fascination with black holes across technical, scientific and artistic types of imagination as a symptom of cognitive overwhelm at the level of data management (B. Bratton, T. Paglen, Y. Hui). At a time when the artificially intelligent agents collecting, storing, mining, and processing are starting to exceed planetary resources, hungry black holes and other extraplanetary phenomena have taken over from earthbound “clouds” (JD Peters) as metaphors of technical and conceptual expansion. The paper examines the off-world frontiers of data collection of what it calls the “Extradata Era” in contemporary photography and theoretical physics.
Katedre za teoretične vede UL ALUO
Ljubljana, 24 September, 2025
Photos from the Lecture
Black holes in the arts and beyond
Symposium: Ecology and Performing Arts, Amfiteater Journal of Performing Arts Theory, Slovenian Theatre Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia, October 9-10
Asist. dr. Eszter Polonyi, UL FMF, UL ALUO, Kunstuniversität Linz
(with Sašo Grozdanov)
Short abstract: This talk examines how artists, scientists and critical thinkers have sought to radically unsettle normative conceptions of the self and the environment by engaging with the physics of black holes. The talk presents work being done on an interdisciplinary ARIS project being carried out at the Physics and Mathematics Faculty (FMF) and the Academy of Arts (ALUO) at the University of Ljubljana.
Ljubljana, 9-10 October, 2025
Documentation from the Lecture
Black holes, the edge of knowledge, and what is knowable:
Past lessons and future challenges
Location: J19/F1, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Jadranska ulica 19, Ljubljana
Date: 17 November 2025, 2:15 p. m.
Speaker: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Sašo Grozdanov
Black holes are probably the most fascinating objects in nature. Their study places us at the frontier between known and unknown physical laws—at the intersection of classical General Relativity, quantum physics, and the still-developing theory of quantum gravity. In the first part of this talk, I will discuss what black holes are, what we currently understand about them, what remains mysterious, and how they fit into the string-theoretic holographic (AdS/CFT) duality, which connects certain theories of quantum gravity to quantum field theories. I will then present some of my past research results that stem from studying black holes and their relation to quantum physics through holography. These include statements about hydrodynamics, many-body localisation, heavy-ion physics, and quantum chaos, all in strongly interacting quantum field theories. Finally, I will outline several foundational open problems in theoretical physics and reflect on the connections between physics, philosophy, and art.
Ljubljana, 17 November, 2025
Documentation from the Lecture
Title: Black Holes and «One Hundred Thousand Suns»
Seminar and workshop
Location: Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome
Date: Nov. 27, 2025, Villino Stroganoff, Via Gregoriana 22, 00187 Rome and online
Speakers: Dr. Eszter Polonyi, Dr. Sašo Grozdanov, and Rohini Devasher
In this interdisciplinary seminar, an artist, a historian and a physicist come together to explore how visual methods produce knowledge about astronomical phenomena. How does the human observer approach the unseeable, the unknowable? In 2019, the iconic visualization of a black hole was released by the Event Horizon Telescope. This builds upon a long history of visual methods in observing celestial objects, from drawing to analog and digital photography. The seminar revolves around Dr. Eszter Polonyi and Dr. Sašo Grozdanov’s work on black holes and photography, and on Rohini Devasher’s artistic practice on portraying the Sun. We explore visual methodologies and interdisciplinary work processes – spanning art, physics, and history – through the lense of the astronomical image.
