Diffused Seeing:The Epistemological Challenge of Generative AI

The article examines the transformation of the relationship between seeing and understanding in humans and machines by the technologies of machine learning known as ‘generative AI’. Taking Stable Diffusion as a case study, but also looking at its counterparts (DALL·E 2, Midjourney), it starts by analysing the photographic infrastructure underpinning these generative models. The subsequent examination of ‘diffusion’ as a key concept that underpins the text-to-image generation process leads to some broader questions about the ongoing instability and dissolution of our current epistemological and political frameworks. Taking seriously the charge issued by some critics equating developments in generative AI with nihilism or even fascism, the article considers whether the current socio-technical moment can also offer some emancipatory possibilities. Images are used as part of the article not just by way of illustration but also to enact some of its argument

Photography after the Human

How can we visualise and subsequently reimagine the abstraction that is the extinction of human species while there is still time? The article addresses this question by considering the existence of images – and, in particular, light-induced mechanical images known as photographs – after the human. The “after the human” designation does not just refer to the material disappearance of the human in some kind of distant future, but also to the present imagining of the disappearance of the human world as a prominent trope in art and other cultural practices. Such “ruin porn” has some historical antecedents: from the sublime Romantic landscapes of ruined abbeys through to paintings such as Rotunda by Joseph Gandy, commissioned by John Soane, the architect of the Bank of England, and depicting the bank as a ruin even before it was built. Yet the visualisation of ruins has gained a new inflection in the Anthropocene, a period that is said to be suffering from a dual eco-eco crisis: the current global economic crisis and the impending – and irreversible – environmental crisis. We can think here of the seductive and haunting images of Detroit, a financially bankrupt North American city with a glorious industrial and architectural past – but also of TV series imagining our demise as a species, such as History channel’s Life after People. By extending the temporal scale beyond that of human history and introducing the horizon of extinction into the discussion, the article denaturalises our political and aesthetic frameworks through which we humans see and understand ourselves. It also takes some steps towards imagining a post-neoliberal world here and now

AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams

Can computers be creative? Is algorithmic art just a form of Candy Crush? Cutting through the smoke and mirrors surrounding computation, robotics and artificial intelligence, Joanna Zylinska argues that, to understand the promise of AI for the creative fields, we must not confine ourselves solely to the realm of aesthetics. Instead, we need to address the role and position of the human in the current technical setup – including the associated issues of labour, robotisation and, last but not least, extinction. Offering a critique of the socio-political underpinnings of AI, AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams raises poignant questions about the conditions of art making and creativity today. The book critically examines artworks that use AI, be it in the form of visual style transfer, algorithmic experiment or critical commentary. It also engages with their predecessors, including robotic art and net art. AI Art includes a project from Zylinska’s own art practice titled ‘View from the Window’, which explores human and nonhuman forms of intelligence, perception and action. The book closes with speculation on future art – and on art’s future

Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene

Life typically becomes an object of reflection when it is seen to be under threat. In particular, humans have a tendency to engage in thinking about life (instead of just continuing to live it) when being confronted with the prospect of death: be it the death of individuals due to illness, accident or old age; the death of whole ethnic or national groups in wars and other forms of armed conflict; but also of whole populations, be they human or nonhuman. Even though Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene is first and foremost concerned with life—understood as both a biological and social phenomenon—it is the narrative about the impending death of the human population (i.e., about the extinction of the human species), that provides a context for its argument. “Anthropocene” names a geo-historical period in which humans are said to have become the biggest threat to life on earth. However, rather than as a scientific descriptor, the term serves here primarily as an ethical injunction to think critically about human and nonhuman agency in the universe. Restrained in tone yet ambitious in scope, the book takes some steps towards outlining a minimal ethics thought on a universal scale. The task of such minimal ethics is to consider how humans can assume responsibility for various occurrences in the universe, across different scales, and how they can respond to the tangled mesh of connections and relations unfolding in it. Its goal is not so much to tell us how to live but rather to allow us to rethink “life” and what we can do with it, in whatever time we have left. The book embraces a speculative mode of thinking that is more akin to the artist’s method; it also includes a photographic project by the author

AI Art

Can computers be creative? Is algorithmic art just a form of Candy Crush? Cutting through the smoke and mirrors surrounding computation, robotics and artificial intelligence, Joanna Zylinska argues that, to understand the promise of AI for the creative fields, we must not confine ourselves solely to the realm of aesthetics. Instead, we need to address the role and position of the human in the current technical setup – including the associated issues of labour, robotisation and, last but not least, extinction. Offering a critique of the socio-political underpinnings of AI, AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams raises poignant questions about the conditions of art making and creativity today. The book critically examines artworks that use AI, be it in the form of visual style transfer, algorithmic experiment or critical commentary. It also engages with their predecessors, including robotic art and net art. AI Art includes a project from Zylinska’s own art practice titled ‘View from the Window’, which explores human and nonhuman forms of intelligence, perception and action. The book closes with speculation on future art – and on art’s future

Creative Media: performance, invention, critique

The discussion that follows is an attempt to enact a different mode of doing critical work in the arts and humanities. It adopts the format of a ‘live essay’, performed in (at least) two voices, via numerous exchanges of electronic traces, graphic marks, face-to-face utterances and corporeal gasps. This format is aimed at facilitating collaborative thinking and dialogic engagement with ideas, concepts and material objects at hand between the essay’s authors, or rather conversational partners. Our direct entry point into the discussion lies with what we are calling a ‘creative media project’. It will provide a focus for our broader consideration of issues of cross-disciplinary performance in this piece