Abstract
Speculation is rife around the advent of A.I. and what this will mean for humankind, with a special concern that the development and use of creative imaging technologies like Midjourney, DreamStudio and Luma Dream Machine will have a totally devastating effect upon the arts, especially in the field of design.
Such predictive technology acts to both frame and derail human-to-human communication in what I describe as corporate anti-poetic systems. What currently separates machine learning models and the artist or poet is not bias, as both humans and A.I. imaging programs and LLM's contain biases within their systems. What separates is a capacity not only to 'know' but to 'feel' which are the foundations of a creative or poetic impulse.
A.I. imaging programs, in particular, both inform and are informed by the imaginaries of corporations and militaries, having been initially developed from facial recognition and surveillance software. It is full of ghosts, the spirits of dead artists and poets. I argue that it could be read a zombie or haunted technology (enslaved and enslaving), neither living nor non-living, as a form of sorcery, making the algorithms and their generated A.I. images a form of conjuring.
This article draws on the work of Jacques Derrida around the concepts of the Pharmakon (as both poison and cure) and Parergon (incidental or by-work) to re-frame Artificial Intelligence as a form of translation and radical collage. Derrida's work Glas1 had multiple signatories and contributors. In the spirit of that work and to mimic the patterns of A.I., this text will be opened up to disrupt my sole author ownership of it. Each invited peer reviewer, drawn from the fields of art, media, music and philosophy, will have the invitation, and implied permission, to become a signatory and to invite others and so on.
Such predictive technology acts to both frame and derail human-to-human communication in what I describe as corporate anti-poetic systems. What currently separates machine learning models and the artist or poet is not bias, as both humans and A.I. imaging programs and LLM's contain biases within their systems. What separates is a capacity not only to 'know' but to 'feel' which are the foundations of a creative or poetic impulse.
A.I. imaging programs, in particular, both inform and are informed by the imaginaries of corporations and militaries, having been initially developed from facial recognition and surveillance software. It is full of ghosts, the spirits of dead artists and poets. I argue that it could be read a zombie or haunted technology (enslaved and enslaving), neither living nor non-living, as a form of sorcery, making the algorithms and their generated A.I. images a form of conjuring.
This article draws on the work of Jacques Derrida around the concepts of the Pharmakon (as both poison and cure) and Parergon (incidental or by-work) to re-frame Artificial Intelligence as a form of translation and radical collage. Derrida's work Glas1 had multiple signatories and contributors. In the spirit of that work and to mimic the patterns of A.I., this text will be opened up to disrupt my sole author ownership of it. Each invited peer reviewer, drawn from the fields of art, media, music and philosophy, will have the invitation, and implied permission, to become a signatory and to invite others and so on.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | ECHO: a journal of music, thought and technology |
| Issue number | 6 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 19 May 2025 |
