Visual Risk Mitigation, or Indexicality as Monetary Pipeline w/ Mats Carlsson

// November 2nd

// 5 PM

// GEM Lab, FB 630.15

// 1250 Guy

While questions of deception and trickery have been a mainstay in discussions about digital media since its inception, the explosion of synthetic images in the wake of generative AI has accentuated the problems of managing online veracity. This talk examines media provenance and authentication standards, above all the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). Taking the “visual risk intelligence” company Truepic as a case study, it argues that the standard’s automated verification does not secure an image’s bond with reality but institutionally fixes its use. Drawing on Peirce, Lefebvre and Farocki, the talk shows how provenance technologies operationalize indexicality as a trust relation before putting it into circulation. It then turns to Article 50 of the EU AI Act, whose genAI labeling obligations took effect in August 2026. The Act institutionalizes C2PA alongside digital watermarking and fingerprinting, converting a private industry-led standard into a global quasi-regulatory infrastructure. Read as a single visual authentication regime, the three layers place the truth claim alongside, inside and outside the image, the consequence of which will be traced in my coming article. Authenticity is thus settled by a private consortium (C2PA), verified by marks no viewer can perceive (digital watermarks), and confirmed by models few viewers can interrogate (digital fingerprinting).

Mats Carlsson holds a PhD in cinema studies from Stockholm University, where his dissertation, Scopic Debt: A Monetary Theory of Film (2025), framed the moving image as an economic debt relation. His current research examines media provenance and authentication standards through photographic indexicality, operational images and critical analysis of platform economies. He is currently a short term Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University.