Recently on Instagram, beneath some AI-generated work I’d posted, one of my contacts, Michael S, asked, “How does it *feel*? I’d be really interested to hear some more about that, in the context of both making and then your ‘reception’ of what is made…” It’s a difficult question to answer and one that felt important to think about properly, so I decided to answer here in greater detail rather than with a response on Instagram. The following may be more than Michael bargained for, but I have found it useful. It should be seen as notes for a longer piece, rather than a neatly resolved reply.
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“How does it feel?” could relate to different aspects of the process and outcome.
Michael could be asking, how does it feel to write about your father’s difficult death on social media? If I were to answer that question, however, ambivalent is the most likely reply. It seems to me that there is an overcorrection in society. Where decades of repression were the norm, public declarations of emotion, first on reality TV and now on social media are de rigueur. But I don’t think this is what Michael meant, so why is this worth mentioning? Becuase the softening of formerly rigid social norms is probably related to various forms of materialist thought which I explore in my work, and cannot be separated from the ongoing digitisation and atomisation of reality.
Maybe Michael was asking how it feels to be making work about something so personal using a technology considered alienating and alienated by many? Is it possible to make meaningful work with this technology? I have said before, this question was answered over a century ago by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and/or Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. Certainly, it is challenging to overcome the limitations of AI machine-generations and I discuss some reasons in the second half of this post.
Alternatively, Michael might have been asking about my sense of responsibility around the ‘scandal’ of making work with an interpolating machine which depends almost entirely on images scraped from the internet. I imagine Michael is well aware of the tradition of detournement, a phrase coined by the Situationists, along with appropriation in art, which my work draws upon and constantly refers back to. Characters in my project dialogues for one discuss ‘scraping’ throughout, because it relates to the risks and challenges, including reductionism connected to the increasing materialism that technological and other sciences cannot avoid (See Metzinger, 2009; pp 119-133). Image generators are one of the most visual and obvious examples of raw information’s ‘liquid’ nature, and the subsequent softening of borders around container-concepts such as the self, individual, or ownership. These apps feed on original images reduced to data, which have already been liquidised to a certain extent by the internet’s processes, before regurgitating reformed images when prompted.
But I am going to assume that the ‘IT’ Michael was referring to is something else, described here by Vilem Flusser (2011/1985; pp 161) who wrote:
“…people will sit in separate cells, playing with their fingertips on keyboards, staring at tiny screens, receiving, changing, and sending images […]
… it will be meaningless to try to distinguish between natural and artificial intelligences (between primate brains and secondary brains). The whole thing will function as a cybernetically controlled system that cannot be divided into constituent elements: a black box. “
So I will answer, “How does it feel to be a functionary connected via [invisible] cables, with my intelligence potentially indistinguishable from the artificial intelligences which I use to create the work? How does it feel to feed my tragedy to the cyborg?”
To me, it feels a little or perhaps even no different to writing about the world we live in today; to write about the world while performing its becoming.
Was it Will Self who said he does all his writing on an old-fashioned typewriter because he enjoys the physicality of it? It keeps the activity of writing connected to his body. Should I therefore look for feelings of alienation, distanced through the abstraction of liquidised symbolic form? When Flusser envisions the Technical Universe, he imagines ‘derelict bodies’ (Ibid) where we’ll all be increasingly distanced from our physical selves as we connect more and more permanently via our eyes and our fingertips to the black box, to the superbrain. Do I have a derelict body? Well, yes, probably. I am a middle-aged menopausal woman after all and the fact that my studio is a computer doesn’t help. I also have this feeling that Self, a lover of the Situationists and self-proclaimed psycho-geographer (a movement spawned by said Situationists who challenged the notion of ownership and individualism), might take umbrage at my suggestion that Situationist detournement foreshadowed mechanical image-generators. And, forgive me again, for I will make another assumption; if Self were to hazard a guess about how it feels to make my work, he might imply that I would feel lonesome and isolated, if only I could conceive of my disconnection. And that my reluctance to take seriously the rage amongst artists who have their work ‘stolen’ exemplifies a distinct and fatal inability to imagine an Other, because, so Self tells us, in this brave new world there is no Other to speak of (2016).
But it’s not all bad! Luciana Parisi (2004; pp 2) author of Abstract Sex, might suggest IT could feel orgasmic, being that the work embodies (excuse the pun) a patriarchal wet dream where production is severed from the “heavy meat of physical presence”, and is a “triumph of the economy of pleasure”. Flusser seems to agree. He writes, “The prevailing state of mind [in the Technical Universe which we are living through Now] will be reminiscent of the one we experience in our creative moments, the experience of being out of oneself, of adventure, of orgasm” (2011/1985; pp 161).
None of the above is exactly right or exactly wrong. For better or worse, I will take Donna Haraway’s (2016) advice and stay with the trouble rather than yearn for a different time when contemporary technology didn’t yet exist; when instead of having my fingertips on a keyboard, I’d have had my hands deep in harmful chemicals.
I love to write. I really love it. And despite my lack of a fountain pen or old-fashioned typewriter, making this work, with all its contemporary trouble on show, *feels* like writing.
Since I don’t make children anymore – I make work – Parisi and Flusser may have a point when they equate the Technological Universe to reproduction. The word engineer, as I have mentioned on several occasions, has its etymological roots all tangled up with gene/to give birth/beget. And also to “contrive, construct”, and to “seduce, trick, deceive”. (Aren’t people funny?) And to make an image using image generators is apparently to be a prompt-engineer. I love writing and what is prompt-engineering, if not writing? Especially when attempting to ‘write’ an extended work with a collection of images. Writing is always difficult and comes in fits and bursts. Writing feels to me like sculpting with thoughts. And I’m not sure it’s any different when I’m trying to see something come to fruition using image generators. Or photographs. Found, appropriated or original. Moving or still. Often when I make work, some or all of these materials are involved. And right now, it feels to me like I’m creating something. Whether I can overcome the structurally deterministic* output (a tricky concept that I attempt to describe for anyone not familiar with the phrase below), which these generators imbue is part of the challenge. In these latest experiments, it seems I just might get away with it. Except where I deliberately opt to exploit some form of kitsch. And the positive responses I have received suggest I might be right. That feels good too. Although maybe not quite orgasmic!
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*By structurally deterministic (Capra and Luisi, 2014; pp 135), I mean most of the images generated via proprietary machines look very similar and there is something inherent in the limitations of their coding, which means the aesthetic can only go this way or that. Imagine for a moment there really was a God and she said ‘Let there be flowers’ and all the flowers across the whole of reality looked like daisies or variations; daisies and only daisies could and would ever emerge due to the ingredients and the landscape at God’s disposal. And to make matters worse, all those daisies were over-saturated, high definition (HDR), Photoshopped horrors because that’s what the data machine which God uses to make her world was trained on (Thornhill, 2023), and so it struggles to do anything different. For me, that’s the problem with the vast majority of AI images. From a research point of view, that is a greater problem than the scraping issue, because it reflects wider structurally deterministic systems which weave through our societies, arguably leading to depression, anxiety and the inability to accommodate anything or anyone outside the narrowest of norms.
References and further reading
Capra, F. and Luisi, P.L. (2014) The systems view of life: a unifying vision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Field, ~ Sarah-Jane (2023) ‘LAMELLA:// Prompt Engineer’, Sketch Book, 7 May. Available at: https://sjffieldscribbles.uk/2023/05/07/lamella-prompt-engineer/ (Accessed: 14 May 2023).
Flusser, V. (2011) Into the universe of technical images. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (Electronic mediations, v. 32).
Haraway, D.J. (2016) Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press (Experimental futures: technological lives, scientific arts, anthropological voices).
Metzinger, T. (2009) The ego tunnel: the science of the mind and the myth of the self. New York: Basic Books.
Parisi, L. (2004) Abstract sex: philosophy, bio-technology and the mutations of desire. London ; New York: Continuum (Transversals)1
Sabatiuk, L. (2015) ‘Appropriation Art: The Meaning Is in the Media | Media Theory & Meaning Systems (CCTP-748)’, 5 May. Available at: https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/cctp-748-spring2015/2015/05/05/appropriation-art-the-meaning-is-in-the-media/ (Accessed: 5 November 2023).
Self, W. (2016) ‘Will Self: Are humans evolving beyond the need to tell stories?’, The Guardian, 25 November. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/25/will-self-humans-evolving-need-stories (Accessed: 4 November 2023).Thornhill, J. (2023) ‘What happens when AI passes through the “uncanny valley”?’, Financial Times, 31 August. Available at: https://www.ft.com/content/61f22acc-d359-441e-8c3d-875fcc4f95b2 (Accessed: 4 November 2023).
Thornhill, J. (2023) ‘What happens when AI passes through the “uncanny valley”?’, Financial Times, 31 August. Available at: https://www.ft.com/content/61f22acc-d359-441e-8c3d-875fcc4f95b2 (Accessed: 4 November 2023).
- Note: relate later to Wark, Beach Beneath the Streets for passages on desire ↩︎