With the rise of generative AI systems, the term prompt has taken on a new role: as an interface through which we instruct “intelligent” machines to produce content across modalities—text, image, video, and sound. While earlier systems combined specialized models (e.g., diffusion for images, transformers for text), newer architectures integrate these capabilities natively, allowing for seamless multimodal interaction. Prompt engineering continues to evolve as a discipline for refining these interactions, shaping model outputs toward higher consistency, predictability, and utility. Yet not all prompting seeks optimization. Many users engage playfully, pushing the system to surprise, amuse, or even fail. These prompt bricoleurs embrace improvisation and serendipity, exploring the generative system as both tool and toy.
This issue of ArteActa, based on the open call “AI (and) Art: Poetics of Prompting”, features diverse approaches in artistic research that challenge conventional expectations of algorithmic generativity. The emphasis on the act of “prompting” calls for frameworks that privilege the process of interaction between the artist and the technology, instead of merely considering the output. In addressing this process, the contributions draw on established artistic strategies and aesthetic concepts, explore the structural limitations of algorithmic operations, reflect on the affective dimensions of prompting, or adopt the perspective of “thinking-with” (in Donna Haraway’s understanding) to tap into the inherently collective “making” of visual culture and systems of knowledge. This issue contains an introductory essay and five peer-reviewed articles.
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In her essay Images That Hang Together, Noemi Purkrábková suggests that 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. (en)
https://doi.org/10.22501/artact.3790000
Prompting as Thinking-With: Using Generative AI to Visualise an Extinct Dwarf Emu is a creative collaboration between two design researchers, Monica Monin and Zoë Sadokierski (University of Technology, Sydney). Their initial experimentation with 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 in 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 and how working with generative AI might be included as part of an anarchival practice. (en)
https://doi.org/10.22501/artact.2983332
Through a series of photographic assemblages that focus on texture, depth, and atmosphere, The Oracle of Delphi by Delphina Papadopoulos (Royal College of Art, London & New York University Tisch School of the Arts) documents interactions between photographic assemblages and AI language models and demonstrates specific ways that current AI systems struggle to comprehend material qualities and contextual relationships in personal narratives. (en)
https://doi.org/10.22501/artact.3019036
Peter Freund’s The Wager of the Algorithm: Towards a Performatic Gesture shows that the fantasy of the algorithm and, by extension, artificial intelligence imagines that each performs by executing an operational task. Yet based on its inherent computational structure, the digital performance fails to live up to its instrumental promise and this failure foregrounds an occasion for artistic intervention. (en)
https://doi.org/10.22501/artact.2935702
Administering (AI) Attention: Ekphrasis and the Poetics of Prompting by Rolf Hughes (EIT Culture & Creativity) explores how the act of prompting generative AI constitutes a new form of artistic authorship and aesthetic practice, grounded in historical frameworks of conceptual art, creative constraint, and ekphrasis. Drawing an analogy with Kafka’s messengers, the paper positions AI as a similarly enigmatic collaborator, interpreting human prompts through opaque, algorithmic processes. (en)
Accessible here:
https://arteacta.cz/en/artkey/ara-202501-0008_administering-ai-attention-ekphrasis-and-the-poetics-of-prompting.php
DOI: 10.62804/aa.2025.002
The issue is closed by Zuzana Augustová’s Influences of Ernst Jandl in the Theatre and Radio Work of Jiří Adámek, a study of the experimental work of the current Czech theatre and radio director Jiří Adámek, tracing his sources and inspirations to Austrian authors like Ernst Jandl and Peter Handke. (cz)
Accessible here:
https://arteacta.cz/en/artkey/ara-202501-0001_jandlovske-vlivy-v-divadelni-a-rozhlasove-tvorbe-jiriho-adamka.php
DOI: 10.62804/aa.2025.001
