ECAL Conference – David Claerbout
03.12.2026
IKEA Auditorium, ECAL

David Claerbout (born 1969, Kortrijk, Belgium) is one of the most innovative and acclaimed artists working in the realm of moving images today, his oeuvre exists at the intersection of photography, video, 3D and new media.  

He trained as a painter, but became more and more interested in time through investigations in the nature of photography and film. Fusing together the past, present and future into stunning moments of temporal elasticity, his works present profound and moving philosophical contemplations on our perception of time and reality, memory and experience, truth and fiction.

Since the first videos from the mid-1990s, his work rapidly gained complexity, and with the introduction of digital media in early 2000 it evolved into a practically completely synthetic image practice, which put him at the forefront of new media art.

In relation to that "synthetic image", David Claerbout coined in 2018 the term "dark optics", defining the changes within our image culture and the future of lens-based media. His thesis is that with the switch from analogue to digital, lens-based media has increasingly become a product of AI and big data. According to the photographer, the shift from analog to digital has gradually turned lens-based media into products of AI and big data, putting increasing pressure on the trust system promoted by the photographic image.

The conference will be moderated by Francesco Zanot, curator of the exhibition The Quiet Machine. Chief curator of Camera, Turin, from 2015 to 2017, he has curated personal exhibitions and books with and about numerous artists. Director of the Master in Photography organised by NABA in Milan he’s also, since 2019, artistic director of the of Foto/Industria biennial, organized by MAST Foundation in Bologna.