Images That Hang Together
(2025)
author(s): Noemi Purkrábková
published in: ArteActa – Journal for Performing Arts and Artistic Research
This short essay opens ArteActa’s issue AI (and) Art: Poetics of Prompting by proposing to understand generative algorithms as fundamentally metabolic: a dynamic entanglement of data, energy, affect, attention, and ecology. It argues that, given their ubiquity, generative materials can no longer be understood primarily as representations or discrete outputs. Instead, they function as metabolic processes that devour cultural material, extract planetary resources, and reshape perception below the threshold of consciousness. Prompting itself is always an act of transformation rather than merely a symbolic command, and intentional artistic experiments represent only a fraction of a larger infrastructure. The essay thus advocates for a multiscalar understanding of generative media: every prompt is already an ecosystem; every image is already a node in a planetary metabolism.
Border of Democracy - Human, interface, surveillance capitalism
(last edited: 2026)
author(s): Albert Cheng-Syun Tang
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In recent years, global democracies are undermined and declined. As the Freedom in the World report 2022 points out, the world is suffering from 16th consecutive year of democratic decline while the authoritarian rule is expanding globally. There has been a rising concern about responding to such a challenge in relation to surveillance capitalism-enabled issues, such as the commodification of behaviour data, privacy violation, disinformation, cognitive warfare and surveillance culture. This artistic research project intends to unpack the relationship between surveillance capitalism and democracy. The project's focus has been visualising the practices of, and emerging technologies fed by, surveillance capitalism, such as behaviour modification, deepfake technology and the widespread application of GenAI, and their impact on democracy through critical interaction design.
Composed of a custom designed real-time processing system and the open source AI image generator Stable Diffusion, Seeds of Truth is an interactive installation that makes visible the relationship between visual representation of truth and generative AI.
Seeds of Truth invites the audience to interact and experience not only the realness and lifelikeness, but also the artificiality, absurdities and fluidity of "truth" generated by AI. By utilising generative AI from a critical viewpoint, this work aims to raise awareness and questions about how politics are consumed visually and the political nature of AI, and the consequences coming along. What are we seeing? How can we trust what we see? Does want we see tell, represent or define truth?
Seeds of Truth is the outcome of Border of Democracy - Human, interface, surveillance capitalism (2023-) supported by strategic fund from the Faculty of Fine Art, Music, Design.