Saturday, November 9, 2024

A F T E R   P R O M P T S

Generative Artificial Intelligence,
Visual Knowledge Production,
and the American Midwest

By Rain Embuscado

This essay was written to accompany an eponymous faculty panel discussion moderated by the author for the University of Missouri-Columbia’s School of Visual Studies. Both the essay and the panel coincide with the School’s bi-annual faculty exhibition, “In Being Beside,” which runs through December 13, 2024. The article was published in the inaugural issue of the newly-relaunched print-only issue of Forum, an arts publication by the Kansas City Artists Coalition.

Pictures—the amorphous, ineffable things we behold, conjure, hallucinate; a regime of optics that burdens us to presume, to capture, to historicize. Pictures impose on us an expedient entrypoint for accessing the visual, privileging our (dis/in)capacities for ocular registration as the defining criterion for admission. Pictures condition us to conclude that to see is to know. Pictures disclose a convenient artificial episteme. 

Writing forty-five years ago in 1979, Douglas Crimp, the late art critic who curated the influential “Pictures” show in New York two years prior, observed a novel interruption to this flow in the pictorial logic. For Crimp, Walter Benjamin’s “prophetic” premonition of the “caption” and its semiotic significance to the transformation of photographic meaning-making, had been realized by a generation of artists who “turned to the available images in the culture around them,” an instinct he later explored in earnest before the decade’s end. As the beneficiaries of almost a century’s worth of mechanical modes of pictorial reproduction, the “Pictures Generation,” as they are now known, took the images they inherited as an invitation to re-orient pictorial signification away from what is represented and instead in relation to other representations. “It is,” Crimp offered, “representation freed from the tyranny of the represented.” 

The tradition would leave lasting impressions that persist into our contemporary moment. Artist Travis Shaffer, who runs an independent risograph platform called theretherenow., amuses interpretations of the “photographer” as a performative gesture—a position explicitly demonstrated in a self-published artist’s book in 2010. In “[a]dopting the role of the archivist,” as Shaffer described the project, the collection of images assembled in “I Photograph Therefore I Am” depicts other people in various acts of taking a “mirror selfie.” Here, the artist’s curatorial function as an “archivist” and conceptual performance as a “photographer” are, respectively, “obscured” by other peoples’ cameras, a technological device semantically loaded with the accumulated history of its functional capacity for visual capture.

Shaffer, an associate professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia, is currently joined by fellow faculty members in a group exhibition at the School of Visual Studies—one predicated on staging the very semiotic instabilities that activate what Crimp described as instances of representation-in-relation. “In Being Beside,” curated by Bingham Gallery director Madeleine LeMieux, is textually and thematically organized to encourage “dual readings that position two or more objects or entities in relation to one another” to achieve a “chronicle of memory, topography, and the body.” Arguably, this proposition in the year 2024 permeates well beyond the School, the city of Columbia, Missouri, and even the American Midwest. 

Twenty-first century pictures come to us with comparable if not unlikely intensifications that resemble the Pictures Generation’s own tendencies for semiotic play. In the forty-five years since Crimp published his seminal essay, networked communications technologies, in particular, along with the media apparatuses they support, have accelerated the creation and circulation of pictures into a stage that Jean Baudrillard presciently characterized in 1988 as the “hysteria of overproduction,” one in which society seeks to recover the “real” that simulations endeavor to deprive it. This information ecosystem has effectively demoted pictures into the service of sophisticated symbolic systems, and meditations on the poetics of these contemporary artifacts abound: There’s the “poor image,” the “rich meme,” and, invariably, the “visual forms of knowledge production” to which these affects of image capture remain structurally bound. 

But the advent of synthetic generative artificial intelligence models, for some, signals a truly groundbreaking event in the trajectory of pictures that influential scholars are only now coming around to centering in their communities. The rising ubiquity of this technology and its myriad applications—which range from prompt-driven text-to-image and text-to-video content generation, to generative adversarial networks capable of fabricating deepfakes—presents the field of visual studies en masse with renewed curiosities around authorship, copyright, and pedagogical paradigms. Presumably, the availability of these generative artificial intelligence tools also indicates a broader, dialectical shift in the aesthetic problems traditionally assigned to pictures and the evolving, uncharted horizons sustained through the procedural format of prompts.

At the invitation of Lemieux, the Bingham Gallery director, I was entrusted with producing and moderating a faculty panel discussion to complement the exhibition’s curatorial premise. As a graduate student in the Missouri School of Journalism, and an adjunct faculty at the University of Missouri’s School of Visual Studies, I have, for the better part of two years, committed my academic research to studying various U.S. infrastructures’ responses to generative artificial intelligence models. Visual knowledge production of this order can, among other theoretical characterizations, be expressed as a leap from pictures to prompts, implicating everything from First Amendment speech protections to medical imaging techniques.

Full teaching professor Matthew Ballou, who recently joined a panel discussion on artificial intelligence at the Columbia Art League, contends that keeping human nature constant endures as an effective approach. Others, like Dr. Cristina Mislán, an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism, is suspicious of “techno-optimistic arguments that position technology as neutral instruments.” The media scholar, whose research prioritizes critically under-examined perspectives, warns against the structural blueprint driving artificial intelligence solutions, and suggests that the logic underlying these technologies are founded on ideological tenets “that reinforce social and political hierarchies.” For Shaffer’s part, this very logic presents an unexpected opening to reconceptualizing canonical definitions of “Art”—definitions that previously relied on the concept’s coordinate, arbitrary relationships to the author, the market, and the manufacture of value. 

Nora Khan, a prominent voice in this space, advertises the prospect of a “collective” future for art criticism. Discussing the matter with Andrea Bellini in Flash Art in 2022, Khan acknowledged the “vision-first politics of much technology,” and went on to reason with sobering clarity that art criticism’s existing analytical models are inadequate for the task. Khan pondered: “What is to be done with machinic images and information other than gaining familiarity and intimacy with their aesthetic, and reverse engineering their logic?” 

The urgency of these questions gains a special salience unique to the intellectual domains of the American Heartland, where the proposition of a “collective” art criticism implicates twelve increasingly globalized and politically influential U.S. states replete with regionally diverse experiences of the “real.” What might a collective criticism of artificial intelligence look like in the American Midwest? And how does the land, its people, and the knowledge produced in this expansive geographical region function as a node in an international network asking similar questions? 

“After Prompts,” both as an index of ideas expressed through this essay and as a guiding framework for the faculty panel discussion, was this author’s attempt to examine our collective leap from pictures to prompts —an effort that descends from Crimp’s own reminder to us that time, place, and people matter a tremendous deal to the enterprise of seeing.

[1] Artist’s Space. (1977). Pictures. New York, NY.
[2] Crimp, D. (1979). Pictures. October, 8(1), 75–79. 
[3] Crimp, D. (1980). The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism. October, 15, 91–101. https://doi.org/10.2307/778455
[4] Shaffer, T. (2024). theretherenow. https://www.travisshaffer.com/theretherenow   
[5] Shaffer, T. (2010). I Photograph Therefore I Am. https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/29256/   
[6] “In Being Beside,” a faculty exhibition presented by the School of Visual Studies, will be on view from Monday, November 4 through Friday, December 13 at the University of Missouri-Columbia’s Bingham Gallery. The exhibition features work by Lynn Kim, Katina Bitsicas, Joe Johnson, Eric Ordway, Ric Wilson, Ruiqi Zhang, Matthew Ballou, Alejandra Salinas, Joseph Pintz, Wilson Minshall, Angela Shaffer, Catherine Armbrust, Desireé Moore, Travis Shaffer, Kenzie Wells, Madeleine LeMieux, Anna Wehrwein, C. Pazia Mannella, and the author, Rain Embuscado. https://visualstudies.missouri.edu/event/being-beside-2024-svs-faculty-showcase 
[7] Baudrillard, J. (1988). Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster. Stanford University Press. Stanford, CA.
[8] Steeyerl, H. (2009). In Defense of the Poor Image. e-flux. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in- defense-of-the-poor-image/ 
[9] Dean, A. (2016). Poor Meme, Rich Meme. Real Life. https://reallifemag.com/poor-meme-rich-meme/ 
[10] Drucker, J. (2014). Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, MA.
[11] Kuo, M. & Pamela M. (2024). Generative and Adversarial: Art and the Prospects of AI. October; (189): 3–5. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00525 
[12] Deltorn, J. M., & Macrez, F. (2019). Authorship in the Age of Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, Center for Intellectual Property Studies.
[13] Brown, N. I. (2019). Artificial Authors: A Case For Copyright In Computer-Generated Works. Science and Technology Law Review, 20(1). 
[14] Leonard, N. (2021). Emerging Artificial Intelligence, Art and Pedagogy: Exploring Discussions of Creative Algorithms and Machines for Art. Digital Culture & Education, 13(1), 20–41.
[15] Ballou, M. (2024). Panel Discussion for “OK Computer,” Columbia Art League. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZDUkrXyik4 
[16] Mislán, C. (2024). Missouri School of Journalism. https://journalism.missouri.edu/people/cristina-mislan/
[17] Khan, N. (2025). AI Art, Machine Learning and the Stakes for Art Criticism, Lund Humphries, London, UK.
[18] Bellini, A. (2022). Plants in a Garden, Tended by Machines. A Conversation with Norah Khan. Flash Art. https://flash---art.com/article/nora-n-khan/ 
[19] After Prompts” was a faculty panel discussion moderated by Rain Embuscado, and featured the Missouri School of Journalism’s Dr. Cristina Mislán, and the School of Visual Studies’ Dr. Nick Potter, Alejandra Salinas, and Travis Shaffer. The event was held at Bingham Gallery on Tuesday, November 19, 2024.
[20] Crimp, D. (2016). Before Pictures, The Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL.