Peter Szendy: Images of Energy/Energies of the Image Podcast: An interview between Dominic Smith and Peter Szendy

An interview between Dominic Smith and Peter Szendy, around energy, image(s) and artificial intelligence.

Recorded as part of the AHRC-funded project ENERGY: A Philosophy of Practice, University of Dundee. Find out more: energy-philosophy.ac.uk/

Peter Szendy is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Brown University in the United States, and lead for the Cogut Institute’s ‘Economies of Aesthetics’ initiative. Peter is the author of many important works at the intersection of philosophy, literature, technology, sound, and the image, including The Supermarket of the Visible: Toward a General Economy of Images (2016 translation with Fordham), All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage (2016 translation with Fordham), and Kant in the Land of the Extraterrestrials (2013 with Fordham).

This episode explores Peter’s work as an ‘energetics of the image’, excavating how the energies of images may function differently to those of concepts, and touching suggestively on what Peter diagnoses as the ‘euergeia’ of images generated by Artificial Intelligence. As a focal point, we use Peter’s 2021 book Pour une écologie des images (For an Ecology of the Image), forthcoming in translation by Verso in early 2025.