Norma Musih
Biographic Data
| ID | 925378 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Norma Musih |
| GIVEN NAMES | Norma |
| FAMILY NAME | Musih |
| SIGNATURE | MUSIH N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3388-4319 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 9 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Promptable imagination
How does language mediate visual meaning in AI image generation? This article theorizes AI image generation as mediated through three successive linguistic nets that together constitute a new epistemic order of the visual. Building on Vilém Flusser’s media philosophy, we assume that the translation of written language into images is forever incomplete: each act of translation opens a gap in meaning, with visual richness escaping linguistic captur…
Dialectics of training
In this article, we evaluate the politics of recommendation engines by focusing on an indispensible feature of their operation: training. We use the notion of training as a key word which helps us link three bodies of knowledge: data science, the history of automation, and aesthetic and political theory. Training is a staple in the operation of algorithmic systems, and artificial intelligence more generally; it is a practical methodology by which…
Prompt Culture
This article introduces ‘prompt culture’ as an emergent ecosystem at the intersection of artificial intelligence, language, market economy, and visual culture. Drawing on Vilém Flusser’s hybrid scholarship, this study seeks to make a theoretical contribution to the field of AI critical studies by positioning prompt culture between textual sequences and visual simultaneity. While Flusser observed that lines (text) historically emerged to interpret…
Resisting climate imaginaries
The climate crisis is simultaneously a crisis of the imagination, signaling a cultural failure to comprehend and contest unfolding ecological destruction. Conventional media representations of climate futures, including catastrophic documentaries, corporate sustainability narratives, and even climate activism imagery, often inadvertently fuel anxiety or consumerist complacency. Online communities offer alternative spaces of cultural production th…
Natality as world-building in Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind's In Vitro (2019)
This paper examines Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind's film In Vitro (2019) as a site for reimagining world-building through Hannah Arendt's concept of natality. Set against the backdrop of intertwined colonial and climate catastrophes, the film reframes birth not merely as a biological or spiritual event but as a contested act of creation and renewal. Merging Palestinian historical trauma with global environmental emergencies, In Vitro critiques t…
Organic futurism
Bridging memories
Understanding imagination as a performative political action, and therefore as an action that requires training, is at the centre of this paper. Bridging Memory is an activist intervention in which body-sized photographs of Palestinian refugees living today in a refugee camp in South Lebanon were posted by Israeli activists in the place from which they were expelled. The analysis of the project demonstrates the centrality of memory and activism i…
Between emptiness and superfluity
Documentary photography has undergone a process of devaluation in post-apartheid South Africa. In response, Patricia Hayes has introduced the term “empty photographs” into the scholarly conversation, using it to designate images that have been derided as “‘bad,’ ‘boring,’ or repetitious” in post-apartheid settings (“The Uneven Citizenry,” 189). This article revisits a subset of such images to contest their seeming emptiness—pallbearers escorting …
Selfies in Auschwitz
Selfies at Auschwitz have become increasingly popular, and have generated agitated public debate. While some see them as an engaged form of witnessing, others denounce them as a narcissistic desecration of the dead. We analyze the taking, composition, and circulation of several of the most popular selfies of Auschwitz and the online reactions to them. The practice of selfies marks a shift from witness to witnessee and from onsite to online presen…
Digital Holocaust Memory from the Margins
In recent years, the "digital" is redefining Holocaust memory by facilitating the co-production of memory by a wide spectrum of new agents. While digital culture opens new horizons, it also poses new challenges for Holocaust memory, education, and commemoration. This introduction to the special section "Digital Holocaust Memory from the Margins" provides a short review of the papers included in this section and a theoretical anchor for reconsider…
Between knowing and understanding
The village of Miska is one of the 530 Palestinian localities destroyed during the Palestinian Nakba (Arabic for great calamity, catastrophe, or devastation). Although the ruins of these places are part of the Israeli landscape, and most Israeli Jews have some knowledge about the Nakba, they do not understand its meaning. In this paper, I deploy Hannah Arendt’s distinction between knowing and understanding to answer the question of how the Nakba …
Layers as epistemic and political devices in mobile locative media; the case of iNakba in Israel/Palestine
At the centre of this article is iNakba, a digital navigational application created by a Tel Aviv-based NGO in 2014. The app superimposes a layer of ruined Palestinian localities destroyed following the 1948 war, on top of the established and hegemonic Israeli geographical representation. At the end of this war and with the formation of the State of Israel, the presence of these localities was eradicated from both the territory and Israeli maps. …
Selfies in Auschwitz
Selfies at Auschwitz have become increasingly popular, and have generated agitated public debate. While some see them as an engaged form of witnessing, others denounce them as a narcissistic desecration of the dead. We analyze the taking, composition, and circulation of several of the most popular selfies of Auschwitz and the online reactions to them. The practice of selfies marks a shift from witness to witnessee and from onsite to online presen…
Natality as world-building in Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind's In Vitro (2019)
This paper examines Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind's film In Vitro (2019) as a site for reimagining world-building through Hannah Arendt's concept of natality. Set against the backdrop of intertwined colonial and climate catastrophes, the film reframes birth not merely as a biological or spiritual event but as a contested act of creation and renewal. Merging Palestinian historical trauma with global environmental emergencies, In Vitro critiques t…
Between emptiness and superfluity
Documentary photography has undergone a process of devaluation in post-apartheid South Africa. In response, Patricia Hayes has introduced the term “empty photographs” into the scholarly conversation, using it to designate images that have been derided as “‘bad,’ ‘boring,’ or repetitious” in post-apartheid settings (“The Uneven Citizenry,” 189). This article revisits a subset of such images to contest their seeming emptiness—pallbearers escorting …
Digital Holocaust Memory from the Margins
In recent years, the "digital" is redefining Holocaust memory by facilitating the co-production of memory by a wide spectrum of new agents. While digital culture opens new horizons, it also poses new challenges for Holocaust memory, education, and commemoration. This introduction to the special section "Digital Holocaust Memory from the Margins" provides a short review of the papers included in this section and a theoretical anchor for reconsider…
Layers as epistemic and political devices in mobile locative media; the case of iNakba in Israel/Palestine
At the centre of this article is iNakba, a digital navigational application created by a Tel Aviv-based NGO in 2014. The app superimposes a layer of ruined Palestinian localities destroyed following the 1948 war, on top of the established and hegemonic Israeli geographical representation. At the end of this war and with the formation of the State of Israel, the presence of these localities was eradicated from both the territory and Israeli maps. …
Between knowing and understanding
The village of Miska is one of the 530 Palestinian localities destroyed during the Palestinian Nakba (Arabic for great calamity, catastrophe, or devastation). Although the ruins of these places are part of the Israeli landscape, and most Israeli Jews have some knowledge about the Nakba, they do not understand its meaning. In this paper, I deploy Hannah Arendt’s distinction between knowing and understanding to answer the question of how the Nakba …
Layers as epistemic and political devices in mobile locative media; the case of iNakba in Israel/Palestine
At the centre of this article is iNakba, a digital navigational application created by a Tel Aviv-based NGO in 2014. The app superimposes a layer of ruined Palestinian localities destroyed following the 1948 war, on top of the established and hegemonic Israeli geographical representation. At the end of this war and with the formation of the State of Israel, the presence of these localities was eradicated from both the territory and Israeli maps. …
Between emptiness and superfluity
Documentary photography has undergone a process of devaluation in post-apartheid South Africa. In response, Patricia Hayes has introduced the term “empty photographs” into the scholarly conversation, using it to designate images that have been derided as “‘bad,’ ‘boring,’ or repetitious” in post-apartheid settings (“The Uneven Citizenry,” 189). This article revisits a subset of such images to contest their seeming emptiness—pallbearers escorting …
Selfies in Auschwitz
Selfies at Auschwitz have become increasingly popular, and have generated agitated public debate. While some see them as an engaged form of witnessing, others denounce them as a narcissistic desecration of the dead. We analyze the taking, composition, and circulation of several of the most popular selfies of Auschwitz and the online reactions to them. The practice of selfies marks a shift from witness to witnessee and from onsite to online presen…
Digital Holocaust Memory from the Margins
In recent years, the "digital" is redefining Holocaust memory by facilitating the co-production of memory by a wide spectrum of new agents. While digital culture opens new horizons, it also poses new challenges for Holocaust memory, education, and commemoration. This introduction to the special section "Digital Holocaust Memory from the Margins" provides a short review of the papers included in this section and a theoretical anchor for reconsider…
Bridging memories
Understanding imagination as a performative political action, and therefore as an action that requires training, is at the centre of this paper. Bridging Memory is an activist intervention in which body-sized photographs of Palestinian refugees living today in a refugee camp in South Lebanon were posted by Israeli activists in the place from which they were expelled. The analysis of the project demonstrates the centrality of memory and activism i…
Organic futurism
Promptable imagination
How does language mediate visual meaning in AI image generation? This article theorizes AI image generation as mediated through three successive linguistic nets that together constitute a new epistemic order of the visual. Building on Vilém Flusser’s media philosophy, we assume that the translation of written language into images is forever incomplete: each act of translation opens a gap in meaning, with visual richness escaping linguistic captur…
Dialectics of training
In this article, we evaluate the politics of recommendation engines by focusing on an indispensible feature of their operation: training. We use the notion of training as a key word which helps us link three bodies of knowledge: data science, the history of automation, and aesthetic and political theory. Training is a staple in the operation of algorithmic systems, and artificial intelligence more generally; it is a practical methodology by which…
Prompt Culture
This article introduces ‘prompt culture’ as an emergent ecosystem at the intersection of artificial intelligence, language, market economy, and visual culture. Drawing on Vilém Flusser’s hybrid scholarship, this study seeks to make a theoretical contribution to the field of AI critical studies by positioning prompt culture between textual sequences and visual simultaneity. While Flusser observed that lines (text) historically emerged to interpret…
Resisting climate imaginaries
The climate crisis is simultaneously a crisis of the imagination, signaling a cultural failure to comprehend and contest unfolding ecological destruction. Conventional media representations of climate futures, including catastrophic documentaries, corporate sustainability narratives, and even climate activism imagery, often inadvertently fuel anxiety or consumerist complacency. Online communities offer alternative spaces of cultural production th…
Natality as world-building in Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind's In Vitro (2019)
This paper examines Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind's film In Vitro (2019) as a site for reimagining world-building through Hannah Arendt's concept of natality. Set against the backdrop of intertwined colonial and climate catastrophes, the film reframes birth not merely as a biological or spiritual event but as a contested act of creation and renewal. Merging Palestinian historical trauma with global environmental emergencies, In Vitro critiques t…
History (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Art (6 works) · Political science (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · History (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration (4 works)