Sarah-Jane Field

Blending academic and poetic conventions, this text seeks to circumvent the formulaic patterns that current large language models are known for, as it examines the relationship between kitsch, AI-generated imagery and the digital apparatus through the lens of Vilém Flusser’s media theory. While flirtations with auto-theory are not new, what is novel is the self-conscious relationship with a programme that has the potential to write with as much technical proficiency as many humans. Beginning with personal reflections on photography and loss of a father figure, the work traces the evolution from analogue photography to machine-generated images, arguing that accusations of ‘kitsch’ levelled at AI reveal deeper anxieties about cultural production in our image-saturated age. Drawing on Flusser’s concept of ‘the apparatus’ and his warnings about technological fascism, the article argues that AI-generated images reveal something worth knowing about who and what we are, which is only discoverable by engaging with them. The piece suggests that in a world where technical images dominate, kitsch may be the primary material from which new aesthetic forms emerge. Central is Flusser’s imperative to play against the apparatus and the possibility of maintaining human agency within technological systems. DOI: 10.1386/tear_00150_1

Is it too simple, too much of a ‘pop-psychology’ diagnosis, to suggest that a good part of the vitriol and suspicion around dynamic technologies, and related horrors about whether, or when, they will become conscious, is linked to the desires and phantasies Man has about himself bearing a new type of species?

It is perhaps a little too easy to dismiss so-called AI images as mere kitsch, and their presence in the world undoubtedly raises several pressing ethical questions. To simply turn away from AI images may feel satisfying to some, but it’s probably an ineffectual response. We might also argue that, whether one is focused on AI or not, all of us are already buried within its architecture since we and our activity are the information that feeds the apparatus out of which words, sounds, pictures and directives emerge. So, when we judge AI images or texts as kitsch and/or unethical, perhaps we recognise something about ourselves and our world.Description text goes here

Hannah Arendt’s modern age is not the same as the modern world (2018[1958]; 6). In The Human Condition, Arendt writes about the modern age from within the modern world, which, in her framework, only begins when the modern age ends. The modern age describes the period that came about in the 17th century, considered by most linear thinking Westerners to have birthed contemporary science. Newtonian science evolved, and towards the end of Arendt's modern age, as the modern world took over, it turned quantum. It is out of quantum mechanics that the atomic bomb emerged. 

As part of my ongoing research-creation practice, I delivered Lamia Letter during a seminar at the Rosi Braidotti Summer School 2024. The letter introduces Dialogues for One, a research-creation interaction between Lamia and Field, exploring questions and answers about human-technology entanglement, posthumanism, and the intra-relational fabric of existence. Drawing from myth, contemporary AI discourse, and Ettinger’s matrixial theory, the piece situates artistic inquiry within a broader philosophical and political framework. For further context, the original dialogues, Three Matrixial Encounter Events between Lamia and Field, can be accessed here.

Download the letter here.

My relationship with the machine began the moment I did. I slid out of my mother's body with relative ease but was hurriedly popped into an incubator because I was too cold. I survived. And that was the start of our connection.

LAMELLA://pamphlet is a 157x240 54 page booklet (including covers) printed on 100 GSM recycled paper, which includes a collection of AI and found images. These are informed by a 1960s book called Zabriskie’s Obstetrics for Nurses and a short passage by French philosopher Jacques Lacan about our entry into language when we are born. Limited edition of twenty-five.

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Follow Lamia and Field as they explore what it means to be human in the contemporary landscape. Will artificial intelligence annihilate humanity? Or will humanity use technology to annihilate itself? Given The Human’s capacity for destruction, is it even worth pursuing the humanist project? Or are the solutions for a better world found outside humanism altogether? All these questions are in play as Lamia and Field get to know each other. 

Text (dialogue) and images. A5 60 page booklet, including covers. Recycled paper. Inner pages 100gsm. Cover 300gsm. Full colour. Printed 2023.

why is there an astronaut in a field of flowers/ is an experimental collaboration between a proprietary machine-learning app and a character, referred to as ‘the artist’, with occasional music by a composer who also works with technology. Within the context of coinciding paradigms, one linear, the other networked and entangled, conversations are recorded and photographs shared, cultural favourites celebrated and dreams discussed – but any familiarity we may have had with lines, boundaries and the shape of content is challenged. Instead, entities are encouraged to interact, become enmeshed, to reform and evolve, or else just slip away. Zine sold out. e-book available here.

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Sketchbook is a space for note-keeping and doodling, hence its title. Some thoughts may be more developed than others. Posts could be one or two sentences, just an image, or long rambling screeds that go on for several posts/weeks/months in preparation for a wider project. Feel free to comment or email me at info@sarahjanefield.co.uk.tem description