This research investigates what it means to make—and to think through—images in an age of algorithmic overproduction and epistemic collapse. Beginning from moments such as Gaza’s mediated catastrophe, where visibility exceeds meaning, the project asks how artistic research can reimagine the infrastructures that shape perception.

Working within the framework of Pacesetters, a European network for creative resilience and innovation in the face of the climate crisis, it uses documentary practices—particularly film and video—as tools for constructing new forms of circulation and relation. Each laboratory in Spain, Ireland, and Poland functions as a metabolic experiment: how can art metabolize crisis differently?

Engaging Kate Crawford’s proposition of a post-synthetic metabolism (Crawford, 2025), the project examines how art might resist extractive systems by developing counter-metabolisms—ecological, social, and aesthetic—that turn excess into understanding. 

This work approaches artmaking as an infrastructural and political act, informed by Hardt and Negri’s conception of the multitude, and the heritage of Third Cinema which understood film as an infrastructure of solidarity rather than a product of representation.

Methodologically, the research engages poetics—the study of how form generates knowledge—through filmic and artistic experiments that use montage, rhythm, and adjacency as tools of analysis. In the spirit of essay film and dialogic art, these works serve as reflexive structures for thinking-with rather than thinking-over. It differentiates dialogic practice from conventional participatory and collaborative models, treating form itself as a conversational space. 

Ultimately, the research seeks to articulate an artistic intelligence—a distributed capacity to perceive, compose, and reorganize meaning within, and against, the infrastructures of the present. As Trinh T. Minh-ha reminds us, “speaking nearby” can be more radical than speaking for (Trinh, 1992);  what new networks—rooted in co-metabolism, not extraction—might sustain other ways of sensing, relating, and thinking together.

Jacqueline Rowley is an Emmy- and Peabody-winning filmmaker, artist, and educator whose work spans documentary, installation, and experimental media. Her feature documentaries have screened at Sundance, IDFA, and Sheffield and aired on Showtime, HBO, and PBS, while her experimental video works have been presented at Transmediale, OVNI, and MoMA in New York. A founding member of Big Noise Films, she helped establish the Independent Media Center movement in Seattle and later co-created media hubs in Mexico, Argentina, and Iraq while filming across the Middle East and Africa during the height of the wars.

Her credits include the Sundance-winning and Oscar-nominated Dirty Wars, the Oscar short-listed and Emmy-winning In Tahrir Square, and the Emmy-winning 16 Shots for Showtime, as well as New American Nazis, American Insurrection (Emmy and Peabody nominee), and Michael Flynn’s Holy War (Peabody winner).

Rowley has taught documentary film as an artist-in-residence at Bard College and led master classes internationally. She is currently a PhD candidate in Artistic Research at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and a researcher within the EU-funded PACESETTERS initiative. Her work investigates film as infrastructural practice—mapping “shadow networks” of artistic collaboration and exploring how creative work can exceed systems of capture.