Panel Discussion
Distorted Session #3: The (Un)Free Image: From Video Art to AI

Forms of censorship at the dawn of video art and today: a debate on the changing regulation of the technical image

Whereas access to cameras and broadcasting used to be restricted to elite structures, today almost everyone has a smartphone; yet the visibility of images is determined by algorithms and the distribution logic of digital platforms. How has the regulation of the technical image changed over time, and who programs reality today?

Join us for a debate on the transformations of censorship and the visibility of the technically mediated image during a panel discussion with our guests, including Keiko Sei, Hynek Trojánek, Tomáš Javůrek, Kristina Cyan, and Natalia Gravenor. The event will take place on Thursday, May 28, 2026, at 2:00 PM at the House of Arts (Malinovského 2).

The panel discussion is a supporting program for the exhibitions Distorted Image: Chapters from the Beginnings of Video Art and ShadowFrame at G99.

Admission: 100 CZK
Tickets can be purchased in advance on GoOut and at the House of Arts box office.

PROGRAMME
15:00–15:30 Guided tour with the exhibition curator, Lenka Dolanová
15:30–15:45 Opening (welcome, concept introduction)

BLOCK 1
15:45–17:15 Online discussion, moderated by Lenka Dolanová
Keiko Sei, Natalie Gravenor

KEIKO SEI is originally a Japanese writer, journalist and curator. In Japan, she worked as a curator of exhibitions focused on video art in the early 1980s. In 1988, she began traveling to Central and Eastern Europe, where she mapped underground and dissident activities, especially in the field of independent reporting, and organized unofficial screenings of videotapes. She worked in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania, among others. After 1989, she monitored the transformation of the media in the former Eastern Bloc and worked as a curator. She taught at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno, among others. Since 2002, she has lived mainly in Bangkok and is engaged in research on independent media in Southeast Asia. In 2003, she founded the Myanmar Moving Image Center in Burma. She has her own collection of revolutionary videos. In her presentation, she will focus, among other things, on her work within the Infermental video magazine project and her experiences in Eastern Europe in the 1980s and 1990s.

NATALIE GRAVENOR was born in Oakland, California and has been living in Berlin since 1977. She graduated from the Berlin University of the Arts in 1994. Since 1988 she has been active in video and TV production, focusing on topics such as music, media arts, politics and urban transformation of Berlin. She curates exhibitions and film programs focused on human rights issues from a cultural perspective, she also programs and organizes film festivals. In her presentation she will focus on countering (Western) perceptions of Eastern European lack and lag prior to 1989 and examples of creative, playful, subversive use of media (art) technology, also on East/West networks, and a shift from analogue to digital/internet concurrent to the transformation processes in Central and Eastern European; utopias of access/participation and disillusionment.

17:15–17:45 Coffee break (30 min)

BLOCK 2
17:45–19:15 Moderated by Barbora Trnková
Hynek Trojánek, Tomáš Javůrek, Kristina Cyan

KRISTINA CYAN, interdisciplinary artist, born in Brest, lives and works in Vienna. Her practice focuses on the intersection of media and bio technologies, body politics, image politics, and feminist and environmental studies. She understands technology as a hybrid political space of expansion that engages questions of information, identity, publicity, and power. Her work explores the impact of globalization and advanced media technologies on fragmented perceptions of reality, while reflecting contemporary ethical and social challenges. She has been nominated for the Ö1 Talent Prize Fine Arts Austria, and her work has been shown at venues including Mumok Cinema and Kunst Haus Wien, the B3 Biennial of the Moving Image, the European Media Art Festival, the Film Museum in Vienna, and The Wrong Biennale. kristinacyan.com

HYNEK TROJÁNEK is a screenwriter who has worked on television series, animated films, and documentaries. For more than ten years, he worked as an assistant for people with disabilities and mental health conditions. He currently works at the digital rights organization IuRe (Iuridicum Remedium), a non-governmental organization focused on civil liberties in the digital sphere, privacy rights, and public oversight of technology. Within IuRe, he leads campaigns against facial recognition cameras, raises awareness of digital exclusion, and advocates for the right to remain offline. He also helps organize the Big Brother Awards, an anti-award presented in Prague since 2005 that highlights major privacy violations, misuse of personal data, and increasing surveillance by both state and commercial actors. iure.org

TOMÁŠ JAVŮREK is an artist, programmer, and curator working with digital media, AI, and networked systems. He explores the politics of computation through experimental tools, platforms, and exhibitions. In 2023, he completed a PhD titled Big Brother is Dead at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology, where he also taught photography. He is one half of the digital duo “&” (metazoa.org), co-founder of ScreenSaverGallery, and co-curator of AI: All Idiots (MeetFactory, 2021), an exhibition focused on the extractive logic of AI. His current project Garden Me Tender, developed with Lucia Bergamaschi, investigates plant rights to land using AI and sensor systems. He led the research project “Decentralised Big Data Collection, Analysis, Visualisation and Interpretation in Art Practice” (TAČR 2018–2021), and his current work builds systems that consider not only what technology does, but also what it could become. tomasjavurek.cz