Artificial intelligence (AI) has come to occupy a pivotal place within contemporary design culture, reframing how images and texts are produced, circulated, classified, and made legible to publics and professionals alike. This issue foregrounds the infrastructures through which these processes reshape appearance, legibility, and social efficacy in culture, treating AI not merely as a tool but as an ambient mediator of cultural mediation and value production. The regional vantage of Central Europe and its Visegrád context sharpens this inquiry. The uneven presence of languages, visual archives, and everyday environments within dominant computational systems foregrounds very specific modalities of visibility and invisibility, including the post–Cold War archival history that continues to condition current digital infrastructures. The essays gathered here emerged from collaborative conversations across the region among authors committed to understanding how AI is altering the cultural conditions of visibility in Central Europe, and who recognised early on that this emergence urgently required concepts, cases, and attuned methods. The issue represents a regional effort to articulate a problem that has already become materially present while its vocabulary is still forming. The variety of approaches assembled here reflects the difficulty of grasping AI as a cultural condition from any single vantage point. Taken together, the studies suggest that what is at stake in the V4 regional context exceeds technical performance and questions of fairness taken in isolation. More fragile issues are involved: how cultures appearing in AI images can avoid homogenisation, and how cultural heritage is maintained within systems that increasingly organise collective knowledge. From this perspective, Central Europe is an important context, in which wider transformations in cultural mediation are observable with particular clarity.
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