What Is This Image Doing Here?
(2025)
author(s): Giselle Hinterholz
published in: Research Catalogue
This visual essay explores images generated through AI-based expansion of a simple photographic composition.
Without commands or prompts, the system infers human gestures, shadows, and presences — inventing what was never there.
The project questions authorship, visibility, and the power of symbolic residue when language no longer mediates creation.
It is not about representation — it is about refusal, inference, and the unsettling persistence of images beyond intention.
Playing Future Narratives
(2025)
author(s): Futuring Together
published in: Norwegian University of Science and Technology
By experimenting with the use of artificial intelligence and collaborative storytelling in public engagement with sustainability challenges, the Futuring Together group, through an interactive installation "Playing Future Narratives" at Artistic Research Week 2024 (22nd - 27th October 2024) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, explored how AI-enhanced collaborative narrative creation augmented with a visual essay could facilitate understanding of energy transition futures in Trondheim, Norway.
The installation utilized ScenSyn, a multiplayer interactive storytelling system combining AI-assisted narrative generation with human creativity, together with a visual essay highlighting the complexities and contradictions inherent in the energy transition.
The project provided an opportunity to test how AI-enhanced collaborative storytelling might offer unique opportunities for exploring complex societal transitions and raised important questions about the role of artificial intelligence in creative processes and public discourse.
Human-AI Design Version 0.9.2, 2024-09-24
(2024)
author(s): Udo Maria Fon
published in: Research Catalogue
This paper introduces the Human-AI Design approach, a novel framework for addressing complex sustainability challenges through the integration of human expertise and artificial intelligence. The approach leverages social and global entropy concepts to quantify and visualize resource distribution and irreversible processes within social and ecological systems. By combining entropy modeling, participatory processes, and advanced AI techniques, Human-AI Design offers a comprehensive methodology for tackling multifaceted global issues. The paper presents a theoretical framework, outlines the methodology, and demonstrates its application through a case study on global water resource management. The approach's potential is further explored in extended applications across various domains, including education, urban planning, biodiversity conservation, and climate change mitigation. Future scenarios of human-AI coevolution are discussed, highlighting both the immense potential and significant challenges ahead. The Human-AI Design approach represents a promising step towards more effective and integrated solutions to global sustainability challenges, offering new possibilities for understanding and managing complex systems while emphasizing the importance of ethical considerations and adaptive implementation.
Designing Agency
(2023)
author(s): Johanna Drucker
published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
As AI systems proliferate, questions about their emergent capacities focus on intelligence, sentience, and control. But the issue of agency, the capacity for action with consequences, brings other design issues into play. Agency takes many forms including mechanical, incidental, probabilistic, and intentional, but is largely assessed on the basis of behaviors. The challenge of designing agency can be met by considering what must be programmed into a system to provide it with the capacity for action, but the distinction between the appearance of agency (simulacral) and actual agency (intentional) is difficult to test. This paper discusses some of the connections between agency and debates in physics about determinism and probability as they relate to the question of human capacities for intentional action and concludes with a discussion of the difficulties of conceptualizing agency without falling into Romantic models of disruptive behavior. No easy answers arise in regard to the problem of designing intentional agency in a way that can be either tested or constrained.
This visual essay explores images generated through AI-based expansion of a simple photographic composition. Without commands or prompts, the system infers human gestures, shadows, and presences — inventing what was never there. The project questions authorship, visibility, and the power of symbolic residue when language no longer mediates creation. It is not about representation — it is about refusal, inference, and the unsettling persistence of images beyond intention.open exposition comments (0)