Blending academic and poetic conventions, this text seeks to circumvent the formulaic patterns that current large language models are known for, as it examines the relationship between kitsch, AI-generated imagery and the digital apparatus through the lens of Vilém Flusser’s media theory. While flirtations with auto-theory are not new, what is novel is the self-conscious relationship with a programme that has the potential to write with as much technical proficiency as many humans. Beginning with personal reflections on photography and loss of a father figure, the work traces the evolution from analogue photography to machine-generated images, arguing that accusations of ‘kitsch’ levelled at AI reveal deeper anxieties about cultural production in our image-saturated age. Drawing on Flusser’s concept of ‘the apparatus’ and his warnings about technological fascism, the article argues that AI-generated images reveal something worth knowing about who and what we are, which is only discoverable by engaging with them. The piece suggests that in a world where technical images dominate, kitsch may be the primary material from which new aesthetic forms emerge. Central is Flusser’s imperative to play against the apparatus and the possibility of maintaining human agency within technological systems.
This article is based on a talk given as part of Shifting Power’s (OU) 2024 After AI Symposium
Publication: Technoetic Arts
Article: DOI: 10.1386/tear_00150_1
Is it too simple, too much of a ‘pop-psychology’ diagnosis, to suggest that a good part of the vitriol and suspicion around dynamic technologies, and related horrors about whether, or when, they will become conscious, is linked to the desires and phantasies Man has about himself bearing a new type of species?
Website: Lexiconia.Art
Article: Prompt Engineer
It is perhaps a little too easy to dismiss so-called AI images as mere kitsch, and their presence in the world undoubtedly raises several pressing ethical questions. To simply turn away from AI images may feel satisfying to some, but it’s probably an ineffectual response. We might also argue that, whether one is focused on AI or not, all of us are already buried within its architecture since we and our activity are the information that feeds the apparatus out of which words, sounds, pictures and directives emerge. So, when we judge AI images or texts as kitsch and/or unethical, perhaps we recognise something about ourselves and our world.
Website: [cloud]
Blog post: Aftertaste
Hannah Arendt’s modern age is not the same as the modern world (2018[1958]; 6). In The Human Condition, Arendt writes about the modern age from within the modern world, which, in her framework, only begins when the modern age ends. The modern age describes the period that came about in the 17th century, considered by most linear thinking Westerners to have birthed contemporary science. Newtonian science evolved, and towards the end of Arendt’s modern age, as the modern world took over, it turned quantum. It is out of quantum mechanics that the atomic bomb emerged.
Website: Posthuman Network
Blog post: Aftertaste
As part of my ongoing research-creation practice, I delivered Lamia to Letter during a seminar at the Rosi Braidotti Summer School 2024. The letter introduces Dialogues for One, a research-creation interaction between Lamia and Field, exploring questions and answers about human-technology entanglement, posthumanism, and the intra-relational fabric of existence. Drawing from myth, contemporary AI discourse, and Ettinger’s matrixial theory, the piece situates artistic inquiry within a broader philosophical and political framework. For further context, the original dialogues, Three Matrixial Encounter Events between Lamia and Field, can be accessed here.
Rosi Braidotti Summer School
Talk notes: Letter to Lamia
My relationship with the machine began the moment I did. I slid out of my mother’s body with relative ease but was hurriedly popped into an incubator because I was too cold. I survived. And that was the start of our connection.
Publication: Source Magazine
Article: Beyond Romanticism; Relationship Advice for the Now