LATEST PUBLICATION
"Opacity, Memory, and the Limits of Perception" by Chantal Meza
February 2026
Aesthetics of the Unseen, 1 (4)
Publications
A curated programme of research examining how power operates through regimes of invisibility and technological infrastructures.
How do states, capital, and power structures operate through erasure and enforced invisibility?
This series examines disappearance as political technology and aesthetic condition - from forced disappearances and erased histories to algorithmic opacity and the limits of representation - exploring how invisibility is produced, perceived, and contested across contemporary cultural and visual life.
How do algorithmic systems reshape political subjectivity?
This series investigates how digital infrastructures and data-driven systems are transforming the political and ethical conditions of democratic life. Through philosophical and interdisciplinary reflection, the series examines shifting forms of autonomy, agency, and judgment under emerging regimes of technological power.
Aesthetics of the Unseen
A research series examining how disappearance, erasure, and regimes of opacity structure contemporary life. Through essays, interviews, and critical reflections, the series explores the aesthetic, political, and ethical stakes of absence—investigating how practices of seeing, erasing, and remembering can contest the forces that render lives, bodies, and histories invisible
Featured Publications
Aesthetics of the Unseen 1 (3)
Long-form Interview with Miguel Moctezuma (FOUND Project / Oxford University) on disappearance as a political and environmental practice, tracing how community knowledge and forensic technologies reshape the search for the missing and challenge the opacity through which violence operates.
Aesthetics of the Unseen 1 (2)
Essay by Henry A. Giroux analysing the authoritarian erosion of historical memory, focusing on how censorship, curricular restrictions, and the politicisation of cultural institutions reshape public understanding of the past. The piece examines the strategic use of forgetting in contemporary neo-fascist movements and underscores memory’s role in sustaining democratic life.
Florence Papers on AI and Democracy
The Florence Papers investigates how digital infrastructures and data-driven systems are redrawing the political, ethical and perceptual conditions of democratic life. Through philosophical and interdisciplinary reflection, the series examines shifting forms of autonomy and civic agency shaped by emerging regimes of technological power.
Featured Publications
The Florence Papers on AI and Democracy 1 (1)
Essay by Ulises A. Mejias examining how the consolidation of state and corporate surveillance infrastructures reshapes the conditions of democratic life. Through an analysis of data extraction, digital militarisation and the political economy of platforms, the piece traces how algorithmic governance normalises authoritarian tendencies under the guise of innovation. Originally published in English as an editorial for Al Jazeera, it appears here in Italian translation for the Florence Papers, expanding the reach of Mejias’s critique to new publics concerned with autonomy, agency and the future of civic participation
All Publications