This paper discusses a creative collaboration between two design researchers using text-to-image prompts as a way to think across a range of ideas, including the relationships between collage practices and AI image generation – both modes of image-making that create images with images – as well as taking an “anarchival” approach to addressing absence in historical archives. Initial experimentation with the prompt-based model DALL-E 2 involved writing multiple prompts to generate images of the extinct King Island dwarf emu, specifically an emu taken to live on Empress Josephine’s estate outside Paris. There is little visual record of the dwarf emus, and what remains is ambiguous and factually inaccurate. The scarcity of visual reference material provides an interesting case study for how a generative image model might attempt to elaborate a new image about a historical event. The results provide material to help think about how image generation models work, and also how we might visualise the experience of an extinct species. Reflecting on the initial experiments, we began to consider prompting with large-scale image generation models as a way to think-with and speculate, rather than to merely generate. We employ two methods to critique the resulting images: visual content analysis and comparative analysis across image-generation models. We conclude that at a time of both deliberate and accidental miscommunication, it is important for those with expertise in how images “work” to critique and analyse image-generating tools, and consider how working with generative AI might be included as part of an anarchival practice.
Zveřejněno: 15. červenec 2025 Zobrazit citaci
EXPOSITION IN RESEARCH CATALOGUE
References
Adams, Rachel. 2021. “Can artificial intelligence be decolonized?” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 46 (1–2): 176–97. https://doi.org/10.1080/03080188.2020.1840225.
Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image Music Text. Fontana Press.
Batycka, Dorian. 2022. “Meet ‘Loab,’ the Latest Example of A.I.-Generated Art Creeping Out the Internet (Sorry in Advance for the Nightmares).” Artnet, September 12. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/meet-loab-the-latest-example-of-a-i-generated-art-creeping-out-the-internet-sorry-in-advance-for-the-nightmares-2173737.
Cooley, Mackenzie, Anna Toledano, and Duygu Yıldırım, eds. 2023. Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds. Routledge.
Crawford, Kate, and Vladan Joler. 2018. “Anatomy of an AI System: The Amazon Echo as an Anatomical Map of Human Labor, Data and Planetary Resources.” AI Now Institute and Share Lab. https://anatomyof.ai/. Accessed March 6, 2025.
Crespo, Sofia. 2022. Critically Extant. https://criticallyextant.com.
Durrant, Abigail, John Vine, Jayne Wallace, and Joyce S. R. Yee. 2017. “Research Through Design: Twenty-First Century Makers and Materialities.” Design Studies 33 (3): 3–10. https://doi.org/10.1162/DESI_a_00447.
Ernst, Wolfgang. 2013. Aura and Temporality: The Insistence of the Archive. MACBA.
Foster Hal. 2004. "An Archival Impulse". October 110 (Autumn): 3–22.
Genette, Gérard. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Literature, Culture, Theory 20. Cambridge University Press.
Ginsberg, Alexandra Daisy. 2019. The Substitute. Video installation.
Gothe, Jacqueline and Jason De Santolo. 2022. “Decolonising Design Practices and Research in Unceded Australia: Reframing Design-Led Research Methods.” Architecture_MPS 21, 1 (2022): 2. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.amps.2022v21i1.002.
Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Experimental Futures. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373780.
Hertzmann, Aaron. 2020. “Visual Indeterminacy in GAN Art.” Leonardo 53 (4): 424–28.
Kadour, Ric Kasini, ed. 2022. Artists in the Archives: Community, History, & Collage. Kolaj and Kasini.
Kang, Edward B. 2023. “Ground Truth Tracings (GTT): On the Epistemic Limits of Machine Learning.” Big Data & Society 10 (1). 20539517221146122. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517221146122.
“LAION-Aesthetics.” 2022. https://github.com/LAION-AI/laion-datasets/blob/main/laion-aesthetic.md.
Luccioni, Sasha, Yacine Jernite, and Emma Strubell. 2024. “Power Hungry Processing: Watts Driving the Cost of AI Deployment.” In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 85–99. Association for Computing Machinery.
Mackenzie, Adrian, and Anna Munster. 2019. “Platform Seeing: Image Ensembles and Their Invisualities.” Theory, Culture & Society 36 (5): 3–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276419847508.
“Midjourney.” 2023. Text-to-image model. https://www.midjourney.com/home/?callbackUrl=%2Fapp%2F.
Mitchell, W. J. Thomas. 2005. What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images. University of Chicago Press.
Ngai, Sianne. 2012. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Harvard University Press.
Offert, Fabian. 2023. “On the Concept of History (in Foundation Models).” IMAGE. Zeitschrift Für Interdisziplinäre Bildwissenschaft 19 (1): 121–134. http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/22316.
Offert, Fabian. 2021. “Latent Deep Space: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in the Sciences.” Media+Environment 3 (2). https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.29905.
Offert, Fabian, and Thao Phan. 2022. “A Sign That Spells: DALL·E 2, Invisual Images and The Racial Politics of Feature Space.” arXiv Preprint, https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.06323.
Offert, Fabian, and Peter Bell. 2021. “Perceptual Bias and Technical Metapictures: Critical Machine Vision as a Humanities Challenge.” AI & Society 36: 1133–1144. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01058-z.
Pepperell, Robert. 2011. “Connecting Art and the Brain: An Artist’s Perspective on Visual Indeterminacy.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 5: 1–12.
Pfennigwerth, S. 2013. “New Creatures Made Known: Some Animal Histories of the Baudin Expedition.” In Discovery and Empire: The French in the South Seas , edited by John West-Scooby. University of Adelaide Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.20851/j.ctt1sq5wxf.
Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. University of Minnesota Press.
Radford, Alec, et al. 2021. “Learning Transferable Visual Models from Natural Language Supervision.” In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 8748–8763.
Ramesh, Aditya, Prafulla Dhariwal, Alex Nichol, et al. 2022. “Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents.” ArXiv Preprint. https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.06125.
Rose, Deborah Bird, Thom van Dooren, and Matthew Chrulew, eds. 2017. Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations. Columbia University Press.
Sadokierski, Zoë. 2020. “Developing Critical Documentation Practices for Design Researchers.” Design Studies 69: 100940. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2020.03.002.
Sadokierski, Zoë, and Katie Dean. 2023. “On the Design.” In Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds, edited by Mackenzie Cooley, Anna Toledano, and Duygu Yıldırım. Routledge.
Sadokierski, Zoë, and Timo Rissanen. 2022. “Drawing the Extinction Crisis.” TRACEY Journal 16 (1): 1–19.
Schuhmann, Christoph, Romain Beaumont, Richard Vencu, et al. 2022. “LAION-5B: An Open Large-Scale Dataset for Training Next Generation Image-Text Models.” ArXiv Preprint. 10.48550/arXiv.2210.08402.
Sparkes, Matthew. 2022. “Why Are AIs Creating Scary Images?” New Scientist, 24 September. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0262407922017134.
Thierfelder, J. 2019. “Thick Description Through Visualisation: Towards New Representations of Nature.” In Design and Nature: A Partnership, edited by Kate Fletcher, Louise St. Pierre, and Mathilda Tham. Routledge.
Van Dooren, Thom, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster. 2016. “Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness.” Environmental Humanities 8 (1): 1–23.
Wasielewski, Amanda. 2023. Computational Formalism: Art History and Machine Learning. Leonardo Book Series. The MIT Press.
Whyman, Tom. 2022. “The ‘Online Grotesque’ of DALL·E Art.” Art Review, July 6. Accessed August 24, 2024. https://artreview.com/the-online-grotesque-of-dall-e-art.
Zaayman, Carine. 2023. Anarchival Practices: The Clanwilliam Arts Project as Re-Imagining Custodianship of the Past. ICI Berlin Press.
Zylinska, Joanna. 2020. AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams. Open Humanities Press.
Tento článek je publikován v režimu tzv. otevřeného přístupu k vědeckým informacím (Open Access), který je distribuován pod licencí Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0), která umožňuje nekomerční distribuci, reprodukci a změny, pokud je původní dílo řádně ocitováno. Není povolena distribuce, reprodukce nebo změna, která není v souladu s podmínkami této licence.
