Over the past decade, citizen collectives, investigative associations, and the press have reshaped the information dissemination landscape by embracing new visual formats and actively engaging in open-source intelligence (OSINT) activities. These practices establish connections among publicly available information online to challenge official discourses and cover important news events. They heavily rely on analyzing accessible audiovisual content from open channels like social networks. Undergoing a visual transformation, methods and tools from the visual creative sphere are mobilized for both image analysis and visual output creation in the recent development of the OSINT field.

This talk proposes to provide insight into image analysis techniques used by OSINT analysts, as well as more DIY tools (powered by AI or not) produced by enthusiasts who practice OSINT in a more informal manner online. We will focus on methods for deducing two main pieces of information: geolocation and chronolocation. Through a narrative starting with an attempt to geolocate an image from a stock image library, traversing the exploration of a poet using OSINT tools to determine the era depicted in historically significant paintings, to the presentation of analyses recently used to document conflict zones, we will strive to critically question the relationship these techniques have with establishing a discourse of truth.

The aim of this conference is to invite artists and designers to reflect on the potentials and limitations of the paradigm of the image as evidence, to perceive the temptation of gamification of OSINT practices, the risks to slide into a state of apophenia, and the intentional misuses that those tools also imply, in an increasingly conducive environment to disinformation. In other words: what ways of sensing can we explore together as other ways of making sense of the socio-political implications of visual storytelling in the digital age?