What if…? - Counterfactualism in Visual Arts (Elke Reinhuber)
15. Dec
The Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC) invites you to the upcoming talk with Elke Reinhuber (CityU Hong Kong).
Tuesday, December 15th / 2–4 pm / C40.530
- This event is in English.
- This event is in-person with a hybrid option. Contact us to receive the Teams Meeting link.
Registration is not necessary.
Many people may have asked themselves a simple question at some point in their lives: What if? What if I had chosen another subject to study, accepted a different job offer, moved to another city, or followed a different path altogether? Such questions reveal that every decision creates alternatives that remain unexplored. They remind us that history, whether personal or collective, is shaped by choices and contingencies.
This talk introduces counterfactualism as an artistic approach to explore these unrealised possibilities. While counterfactual thinking has long been used in philosophy and historiography to examine how events might have unfolded differently, artists have increasingly adopted it as a means of questioning established narratives and imagining alternative realities. Counterfactual artworks revisit moments of choice, contingency, and transformation, considering paths that remained unexplored and inquire futures that never came to pass.
Based on examples from contemporary art, moving images, immersive environments, and synthetic image generation, the talk examines how artists use counterfactual scenarios to engage with history, cultural memory, and social imagination.
By visualizing alternatives to accepted realities, such works open space for reflection on the forces that shape our present and invite viewers to consider how different decisions, circumstances, and perspectives might have produced different worlds.
Media artist and scholar Elke Reinhuber teaches currently at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong as Associate Professor for Expanded Photography. She studied at UDK Berlin and holds a PhD from COFA/UNSW, Sydney, for her exploration on choice, decisions and counterfactual thinking in media arts. Her award winning artistic research has been presented internationally at conferences, exhibitions and festivals.
In her work, she explores strategies of storytelling and exhibiting to emphasise the parallel existence of multiple truths of the here and now. With her interest in representing cultural heritage digitally, Elke Reinhuber created immersive S3D video installations, 360° videos for dome environments and panoramic screens as well as VR and AR projects. She is curious to explore how photography expands into other dimensions and beyond our visible spectrum, but also in the authorless images captured by machines or the current advent of machine-generated synthographs.