Dr. habil. Sandra Neugärtner

About

Sandra Neugärtner works in material and technical art history from a praxeological perspective. Her research asks how artistic production is organized through practical knowledge, the division of labor, tools, techniques and institutional procedures, and how these conditions inscribe themselves into the materiality and form of works. I understand the organization of artistic labor not merely as the context of art production but as a constitutive condition of its material and formal shape. I pursue this perspective in the longue durée – from premodern workshop practices to the algorithmic image systems of the present.

A particular focus lies on technical images and generative AI. Using the means of provenance research and material image analysis, I examine how images are made, edited, selected and authorized as evidence, and whose labor remains invisible in the process. I reconstruct these processes in contact sheets, image layers, metadata, version histories and training data. My thesis is that digital image production shifts the site at which an image’s evidence is decided: from the horizontal sequence of exposures to the vertical stratification of the image file. Generative AI intensifies this development. To ask how the organization of these procedures inscribes itself into the form of images, I develop the concept of administrative faktura.

Forschungseinheit: Forschungssynthesen (01.11.2026 – 31.12.2026)