ArteActa 2025, 13
Both parts of the term “artificial intelligence” present us with certain expectations: first, that what we encounter is pure artifice; and, second, that it should be judged against norms of individual “human intelligence” – often depicted as exceptional yet inherently elusive. This has frequently resulted in a focus on the “purely machinic” nature of images (co)produced by generative algorithms. Such outputs are either praised as enchantingly alien (surprising, eerie, radically non-human) or dismissed because of their quantitative, computational nature (from Hito Steyerl’s “statistical renderings”...
ArteActa 2025, 13
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...
ArteActa 2025, 13
Through a series of photographic assemblages that focus on texture, depth, and atmosphere, “The Oracle of Delphi” documents interactions between these assemblages and AI language models. The work demonstrates specific ways that current AI systems struggle to comprehend material qualities and contextual relationships in personal narratives, particularly when dealing with dimensionality, surface qualities, and emotional resonance. By analyzing these limitations, the work reveals the gap between human and machine perception of materiality and affect, while suggesting potential approaches for developing more nuanced human-machine encounters....
ArteActa 2025, 13
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. This failure foregrounds an occasion for artistic intervention. “The Wager of the Algorithm: Towards a Performatic Gesture” presents a theoretical statement (illustrated via artwork by the author) in which the overall exposition underscores a dialectic within instrumental reason itself. The “prompt” names are a shorthand for the fulcrum of this problematic.The article...
ArteActa 2025, 13:1-18 | DOI: 10.62804/aa.2025.002
“Administering (AI) Attention: Ekphrasis and the Poetics of Prompting” 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 − figures navigating indeterminate pathways − the paper positions AI as a similarly enigmatic collaborator, interpreting human prompts through opaque, algorithmic processes. Prompts are theorised as a form of micro-ekphrasis: textual acts that mediate between human intention and machine-generated...
ArteActa 2025, 13:1-21 | DOI: 10.62804/aa.2025.001
The study focuses on the experimental work of Jiří Adámek, representing one strand of his theatre and radio directing and writing. Inspired by the radio play Splitting (Spaltungen, 1969) by Ernst Jandl and Friederike Mayröcker, Adámek's theatre production Ticks Ticks Politics (Tiká tiká politika) was released in 2006. He then collaborated with the Boca Loca Lab group on the production Europeans (Evropané, 2008), and since 2016 he has been creating a trilogy for the senses: It Will End with the Mouth (skončí to ústa, 2016), Playing on the Ears (Hra na uši, 2018) and Eyes Up (Oči v sloup, 2019). The first part,...
