{"id":184,"date":"2026-05-06T14:04:41","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T13:04:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/ias\/?p=184"},"modified":"2026-05-06T14:05:23","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T13:05:23","slug":"slow-thinking-and-synthetic-images-notes-from-my-ias-residential-fellowship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/ias\/2026\/05\/06\/slow-thinking-and-synthetic-images-notes-from-my-ias-residential-fellowship\/","title":{"rendered":"Slow Thinking and Synthetic Images. Notes from my IAS Residential Fellowship"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Spending a month at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Loughborough University as a Residential Fellow was a particularly enjoyable and inspiring experience because it offers genuinely stimulating company and something increasingly rare in academic life: uninterrupted time to work on just one thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I arrived at Loughborough in February from Bologna, where I work and teach on topics at the intersection of semiotics, memory and visual studies. At the IAS, I had the chance to develop a project I had only recently started, connected to how AI-generated images shape our sense of plausibility and what constitutes an event in conflict and war contexts. More specifically, I was able to dig into how these visual artefacts mobilise emotional rhetoric and iconographic patterns, how they draw on a kind of \u201carchive of the present\u201d to appear credible and memorable even as they quietly undermine the logic of testimony and evidence, and how they tend to prescribe futures that are not always as peaceful or reconciliatory as they seem. In a moment when time for sustained thinking feels like a privilege rather than a given, having weeks to study and reflect, the university and IAS spaces but also the cosy house that the IAS gave to my husband and me made all the difference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The intellectual conversations at the IAS were one of the highlights of my stay. My collaboration with Prof. Emily Keightley from the Department of Communication and Media gave me the opportunity to think about the temporal dimensions of memory and the circulation of such thorny visual objects. At the same time, chance encounters and lunchtime conversations with colleagues and fellows turned out to be as generative as any planned activity. In particular, Prof. Ksenia Chmutina and Prof. Arianna Maiorani, whose work on disaster studies and linguistics kept pulling my thinking in productive and unexpected directions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among the more formal activities of my stay, I delivered an IAS Research Seminar on 18 February 2026, Re-imagining Conflicts, Making Up Futures: AI-Generated Images and the Memorability of War<\/em>, and, a week later, led a PGR Workshop titled Reading AI Images: A Semiotic Toolkit for Emerging Visual and Memory Cultures<\/em>. Working through concepts like intertextuality, indexicality and visual pathos sparked a rich discussion on how semiotics can be applied to AI-generated conflict imagery, from the moment of generation and the politics of prompt semantics, to the ways these images travel in cultures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond the intellectual work, the IAS is simply a warm place to be. Jenny, Ksenia, Laura, Lynda, Yajie, Connor, Kieran and the rest of the team make International House feel like a genuine community rather than just a workspace. I am grateful for the conversations, the collegial atmosphere, the cheese and wine night (thanks, Laura!) and the chance to think together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr Mario Panico<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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View Dr Panico’s Fellow Page<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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View Dr Panico’s IAS Seminar<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spending a month at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Loughborough University as a Residential Fellow was a particularly enjoyable and inspiring experience because it offers genuinely stimulating company and something increasingly rare in academic life: uninterrupted time to work on just one thing. I arrived at Loughborough in February from Bologna, where I work […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":601,"featured_media":186,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"lboro_blog_alternative_thumbnail_image":"186","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[351,356,233,352,355,350,354,353,357,349],"class_list":["post-184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-residential-fellows","tag-ai-generated-images","tag-digital-images","tag-ias-fellowship","tag-memory-studies","tag-research-reflection","tag-semiotics","tag-synthetic-media","tag-visual-culture","tag-visual-rhetoric","tag-war-and-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/ias\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/ias\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/ias\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/ias\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/601"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/ias\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/ias\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":187,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/ias\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions\/187"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/ias\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/ias\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/ias\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/ias\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}