Unstable Images: Generative AI and the Liminal Politics of Seeing
Unstable Images: Generative AI and the Liminal Politics of Seeing

Summary/Abstract: This essay explores how generative AI has destabilized the visual image, not only as an object of perception but as a contested site of authorship, ownership, and meaning. In a post-Mitchell landscape where the image is no longer what it seems, nor made by whom it claims, the essay harks back to Walter Benjamin’s concepts of aura and the dialectical image to position the visual under conditions of automation and opacity. Instead of asking what AI-generated images are, it asks what they are for. Drawing on the Viennese school’s concept of Kunstwollen (the artistic will or purpose underlying image production) the chapter groups four key case studies around the intentions that animate them: Boris Eldagsen’s The Electrician (to provoke and critique), Jason M. Allen’s Théâtre d’Opéra Spatial (to showcase tool mastery), ING Bank’s The Next Rembrandt (to bridge media legacies), and Obvious’ Portrait of Edmond de Belamy (to generate economic value). Across these unstable images, aura is not absent but refracted: reshaped by algorithms, platforms, and publics. What emerges is a constellation of microtheories for understanding the visual not as a stable category, but as a shifting terrain of negotiations between human and machine, concept and code, value and visibility.

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