This image of Prompt-Scape (above) is a photographic documentation of a real painting, not an AI generated image erroneously called a 'painting.' Prompt-Scape visually reveals the plunder that a prompt to generate an image or text triggers. I use the word trigger deliberately! Is a prompt like a trigger, setting into motion algorithmic processes that target data to detect the statistical correlations most likely to produce what has been prompted/triggered?
I'll let you all have some fun thinking about this painting. I don't think I need to write much more about it! I will, however, leave two provocations.
1. Can the concept of surrender help us think about life in the age of AI? My article Surrendering to 'Too Powerful' technologies: From the F-111 to the MQ-28 Ghost Bat Drone' in Media, War, and Conflict journal.
2. In September I gave a seminar War in Our Hyperconnected World: Exposing the Invisible Battlespace, for colleagues in the School of Communication and Arts, and the University of Queensland, Australia. Below is one of my slides from the talk. Like Prompt-Scape it channels ideas of targeting in the Earth-to-satellite environment. The painting in the slide is Theatre of War: Techno-Seduction (2022).
Here's a quote about Theatre of War: Techno-Seduction from my PhD thesis Drones, Signals, and the Techno-Colonisation of Landscape (2023).
"The painted zeros and ones disembody the organic and strip the non-organic by visually reducing them to the same instructional code. This visual reduction to equivalence exposes insidious relationships, questions forces of techno-homogenisation, and raises issues of aesthetic homogenisation in an age of increasing generative AI."
Cheers,
Kathryn
