AI: Prompting Images of Digital Life

With the recent emergence of image-generating AI systems such as DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, the task of generating images with computers has been remodelled as a text-based process known as 'prompting'. Prompting involves instructing a pre-trained AI model to hallucinate images in reaction to the specifics of text-based inputs. Prompts dictate image style, composition and genre, to the extent that images generated using these systems often appear as weird pastiches, with giveaway aesthetic signals - 8-fingered hands, for example - that point to their artificial origins. Workshop participants will experiment with trying to find the cracks in these systems, using creative prompting to explore whether these systems really are the dawn of a new horizon, offering the potential for breakthroughs in digital image-making beyond the offset of human labour. Participants are required to bring their laptops. James Irwin's bio James Irwin is an Artist, PhD researcher at Kingston School of Art, Lecturer at UAL and Digital Media Tutor at the Royal Academy Schools. He works with web technologies, AI systems and digital sound and image to investigate the notion of a vital life force inherent within digital media. By creating cognitive assemblages - made from a combination of networked digital hardware, software and human wetware - his work builds from new materialist ideas around recentering the human, undoing our role as autonomous individuals and pointing to the ways in which the production of subjectivity is offset to forces outside of our bodies; the posthuman is biological, but also networked and dispersed through machines.