Introduction / Issue 37: Automated Images

The rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and automated systems has drastically altered our perception of digital media, surveillance, and even identity. Visuals generated by these tools are hypervisible, infiltrating every corner of our lives—from selfie avatars and phone filters to synthetic deepfake pornography, and even TV shows like Amazon’s Ring Nation (2022-2023) that integrate footage from video doorbells and smart home cameras across the United States.

By the same token, the hypervisibility of automated images threatens to obscure the many ways in which they work beneath the threshold of visibility, or in which they replicate the insidious nature of the structures through which they operate. Safiya Noble, in her study of “algorithmic oppression” has shown how artificially populated images are embedded within automated systems which perpetuate racism, enforcing what she calls a “technological redlining.”1 Richard Evans describes footage shared online from CCTV cameras or dashcams as “harvest media”; in a drastic shift in the function visual representation, the vast majority of the footage from these technologies is automatically erased and recorded over, with only a select few clips ever “harvested” and seen by human eyes. 2

Issue 37 of InVisible Culture, “Automated Images,” offers a range of approaches that interrogate the invisible mechanisms of automation. It is informed by visual artist Harun Farocki’s term “operational images,” which describes the ways in which automated systems communicate internally by breaking down, mapping, and tracking the physical world according to highly restricted subsets of information. Building off Farocki’s work, Jussi Parrika writes: 

Operational images trouble what an image is, as far as it shifts from representational to nonrepresentational, from the primacy of human perception of bodies, movement, and things to measurement, pattern analysis, navigation, and more.3  

How do you study images which were never intended to be made sense of by humans, which have their own agential nature which evades capture? How can we counter systems that constrain us and prey on our visibility while obscuring their own, or which use our cultural production for the unfettered generation of capital? These and other questions are addressed in the articles and artworks of Issue 37.

In “Instagram and the Memed Self,” Wade Keye examines the dynamic interaction between self-presentation and meme culture on Instagram, positioning the platform as a space where users craft their identities through the creation and sharing of memes. Specifically, by exploring case studies of meme artists Jenson Leonard and Addy Borneman and drawing on the work of scholars like Limor Shifman and Ryan Milner, Keye situates this analysis within the broader field of meme studies, emphasizing how memes operate as a form of digital resistance in political discourse. Keye argues that these memes function not only as personal expressions but also as social commentary, reflecting the ways in which digital culture is shaped by individual agency, even as it operates within the confines of platform algorithms and community norms. Through this lens, Keye challenges the perception of internet memes as mere online ephemera, instead suggesting that they express distinct ideas, politics, and perspectives, deeply embedded in the cultural and temporal contexts in which they emerge. 

Justin Barski’s “Abstraction as Resistance to Racialized Surveillance: The Intersections of Art, Technology, and Identity in the Age of Computer Vision” offers a reading of the automated image’s oppositional potential when employed in coordination with what Philip Brian Harper calls a “black abstractionism” that confounds stable categories and questions the prevailing signifying apparatus.4 Abstractionism here serves as a means of countering systems of control that themselves abstract, plot, and constrain the embodied subject, enacting what Simone Browne defines as forms of “racializing surveillance.”5 David Rokeby’s installation piece Sorting Daemon here exemplifies this strategic redeployment of surveillance technology’s abstractive mechanisms—it turns the operational image’s “reductive algorithmic logic” against itself.

In “Modeling Charisma: AI's Fashion Mirror Stage,” T’ai Smith likewise examines the troubling recursive logic of recent forms of AI through an analysis of the work of artist Amber Frid-Jimenez, which employs progressive generative adversarial networks (PGANs) scraping images from Vogue magazine to jarring effect. In showing how both AI and fashion act as recombinatory systems which generate desire via a constant cycling through of past trends and data—much in the same way as capital itself—Smith highlights the stakes of AIs recent insurgence into popular consciousness. Through an analysis which draws on Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, Smith shows how AI is continuously “repeating and projecting our mis-identifications back to us, like a monstrous twin,” threatening to become a form of ideological apparatus of its own. 

Finally, alongside these articles, we have included a Dialogues post by Christopher Schaberg, as well as an artwork by Jess MacCormack. Beginning with the question of whether artificial intelligence can produce an “imaginative jolt around fly-fishing,” Schaberg goes down a rabbit hole of AI-image generation that yields ever stranger results and ultimately leads to fruitful questions regarding creativity, imagination, and memory. Meanwhile, MacCormack uses AI generation, such as DALL-E 2, to create a queering of imagery, where bodies seamlessly morph into one another, or transform into animals or objects.

Collectively, the articles and artwork in this issue negotiate automated images by highlighting their garish, inhuman, and uncanny nature. Additionally, they propose forms of resistance to automated systems or center artists who adopt oppositional approaches by pushing these systems to excessive ends. 

The contributing editors of this issue are Tristan Bass-Krueger, Jacob Carter, Byron Fong, Wade Keye, Renee Yu Jin.