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IN PROGRESS
The intersection of AI and visual culture is a rapidly evolving area of research within contemporary media studies. Writing a book on a topic that is continuously being redrawn by technological developments requires rigorous scholarship to ensure longevity. This handbook responds to the need for sustained critical inquiry into how AI systems are shaping visual epistemologies, aesthetics, socio-technical infrastructures and imaginaries, and the political economies of images and vision. The handbook creates space for scholars, diverse in geography, career level, and area of expertise, to trace continuities between historical visual technologies and contemporary AI systems while also identifying genuinely novel phenomena that demand new analytical frameworks. This includes exploring how AI challenges longstanding assumptions about human creativity, the ontology of the photographic image, and the relationship between representation and experience in digital environments.

The significance and value of this volume lie in its emphasis on interdisciplinary scholarship for its targeted readership. There is a distinct gap in the market for a handbook at the intersection of AI and visual cultures, aimed at graduate researchers as the primary audience. This audience requires a combination of an historically situated understanding of the contemporary moment, methodological interventions, and forward-looking ideas and theory. We take this into consideration by providing eight sections, with necessary background knowledge on the historical and technical dimensions of various sub-disciplines of visual culture. We also recognise that part of what makes this area of research compelling is the opportunity to include speculative future-oriented thinking. As such, we deliberately include chapter contributions that take a more experimental conceptual approach. This empowers the target audience’s understanding, while also showing how foundational knowledge can be mobilised towards creative research.

We use AI’s chronological developments over the past two decades to structure the first three sections of the book. To explain the emergence of AI in the twenty-first century also involves explaining the technological evolution that made its emergence possible. The first three sections therefore provide the required baseline knowledge of how AI operates from a technical standpoint; alongside the consequences this holds for both change and contingency in the field of visual culture. Sections three and four focus on the significance of Generative AI for image creation and reception across the subdisciplines of visual culture, photographic images and screen cultures. Sections five to seven are about how AI is shaping and reshaping our everyday experiences at the intersections of various core facets of visual culture: representation and identity, institutions and industry, and environments. The final section of the handbook is devoted to AI art and visuality, with a mixture of theoretical and practice-based contributions. AI art strikes a balance between depth and speculation, maintaining a strong connection to the technology's present moment while also exploring its potential and outer limits.

** IN PRESS

This chapter establishes the concept of the ‘Model Museum’ as an analytical framework. This holds a double meaning, referencing the use of AI models—which are increasingly shaping how museums operate and are networked—and the idea of museums as a social model. Linking AI algorithms, experimentation, networked practices, and museum constituencies with strategies of commoning, we form a meta-narrative of connective AI at the museum-museum interface. We ask how these practices might enhance forms of participation and experimentation (play), as well as representativeness, inclusion, and a sense of constituencies (common good), to resist the corporatisation of culture through Big Tech

Opaqueness has long been mobilised within art as a means
of negotiating and expanding our perceptions of visibility and
invisibility, the knowable and the unknowable. This chapter
develops the existing counternarrative to transparent AI by
extending Asbjørn Skarvåg Grønstad’s (2020) work on art
and opacity. Grønstad illustrates how key concepts within
contemporary artistic practices – the political, the aesthetic, and
the cognitive – speak to the productive potential and critical
value of opaqueness. This chapter applies these ideas to artworks
incorporating a machine learning component, exploring opacity
as: (1) holding political value in reclaiming cultural rights through
techno-heritage, (2) an aesthetic frame to account for more-than-
human knowledge and (3) a ‘cognitive value’, or creative affordance
for imagination.

Louise Amoore and colleagues (2024) recently wrote that the generativity of GenAI systems extends beyond the creation of a ‘novel’ output, and into the creation of a new logic/ politics of AI. This paper proposes to build on this theoretical foundation to illustrate how GenAI systems forge an emerging aesthetics that arises from human-machine interaction. 
 
Our positioning of aesthetics is largely phenomenological – as both sensing and sense-making (Fuller and Weizman, 2021). We put forward ‘attuning’ as a necessary mode of perceiving oneself as being in creative partnership with AI tools. Building on Anna Munster’s recent work DeepAesthetics (2025), we argue that the necessity of attuning stems from the recognition of GenAI systems as not only technological, but also culturally constructed as well as culturally constructing. This socio-technical ensemble exceeds human-centred imaginaries. We argue for a recognition of the creative agency of AI models, alongside their material specificity.

Through a discourse analysis of publicly available material from OpenAI on Sora and Sora 2 Pro, we identify three key terms: seamlessness, consistency, and simulation. We find that each term is represented by OpenAI as a ‘neutral’ technological affordance. Our analysis results in a counter perspective, finding that these processes are embedded with human-centred imaginaries from development through to interaction and content circulation. To address this disjunction, we put forward ‘attunement’ as mode of engagement. This enables users to perceive the entangled social, cultural, and technical layers that inform the aesthetics of AI and, consequently, building an understanding of the creative capacity of GenAI. Our paper makes two propositions. First, we consider creative agency through the user-model interaction and questioning the parameters of creative partnership. Second, it positions the generativity of models like Sora not as output, but as emerging aesthetic processes.

This paper explores developments in the relationship between prose and prompting in the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for visual generation. It observes the push towards increasingly descriptive language by two foundation models specifically marketed to creatives: Leonardo’s Phoenix and Adobe’s Firefly. It then considers how and why prose and ‘algospeak’ prompting has become a vital tool for artists in negotiating the affordances of prompt parameters. This paper argues that the language of prompting is changing through fine-tuning and iterative practices at both the technical and experiential level. Tracing these changes offers further insight into the role of text in the aesthetics of visual generation, as well as the tensions between creative work and corporate ethics-washing.

User interactions with LLMs for visual generation are characterised, at the interface level, by prompting. Promptology aims at optimising user input towards optimised model output. Directives for ‘good’ prompts emphasise a formulaic approach that lists subject, style, details and format. As LLMs have evolved, so too has the prominence of ‘details,’ with both Leonardo and Adobe encouraging increasingly descriptive prompts. This paper first evaluates the aesthetic consequences of prose prompting as a technical feature. For instance, when the visual generation AI model Leonardo launched to the public in December of 2022, it included ‘improve my prompt’ as an optional feature. Built on ChatGPT, the feature takes an existing user prompt and extends it into a highly descriptive prose paragraph with an abundance of adjectives. This feature has carried through into its foundation model ‘Phoenix,’ which was rolled out in July of 2024. With relatively minor changes in output between the simplified original prompts and the prompts ‘improved’ by Leonardo, questions arise around the motivations for the feature. Namely, what aesthetic — sensing and sense-making — value is being generated through the addition of AI-generated descriptive prose?

This paper then unpacks the ethical tensions around prompt parameters as a way of contextualising the experiential perspective, wherein prose prompting operates as a negotiated user affordance. Embedded limitations in the prompting process for many models are heralded as holding an ethical imperative, aimed at preventing their misuse. Alongside the fine-tuning of prompt parameters by the companies that own AI models, we have seen the rise of ‘algospeak’ style prompting, whereby users aim to circumnavigate the censorship and moderation of the platform to overcome these limitations. Algospeak prompts are not necessarily mobilised towards nefarious means. Often, they are an attempt at balancing the over-simplified nature of prompt censorship, which conflates things like the post-war art style as a user request for violent imagery, or the depiction of a pregnant stomach with a desire to generate pornographic nudity. The artist-academic Beverley Hood’s process of making her recent work Mother (2024) — an AI-generated photo-film made using Firefly — is provided as a grounded example to elucidate the role of experimental prose and algospeak prompting in visual generation.

IN PRESS
The entanglement of computational processes with physical place is a defining feature of our contemporary milieu. This paper examines artist Pierre Huyghe's installation Variants (2021) to explore how the qualities of mutability and multi-dimensionality within a networked environ relate to the concept of montage. Variants offers its human interlocutors an expanded perspective that enables the integration of human and computer perception. The paper is advanced in three sections. First, we present an introduction to Huyghe’s artwork Variants, which is an outdoor installation at the Kistefos Museum in Norway. Then, we explore how montage relates to Variants, picking up on a few key points — namely, the relationship between the physical and computational spaces on the island, and how latent spaces can be constructed from recording physical spaces. Finally, we put forward the argument that Variants introduces a unique juxtaposition of human and machine vision, which enables the spectator to engage with computational culture in new ways.

This book argues that artists and cultural institutions are a vital force in the construction of a relational, collectively held ethics of human-machine assemblages. Technological change always out-paces ethical governance, producing an uncertain zone between what machines can do, and what is upheld as ethical by diverse publics. Working quickly and often provocatively, artists trace ethical tensions as they are emerging in public consciousness, providing a vital speculative approach to AI futures.

This paper explores the entanglement of human perception and machine operations in contemporary photographic culture, using montage as a conceptual resource to interrogate our understanding of photography in the context of computational vision and algorithmic culture. It takes as a key example the ‘Memories’ feature of the Apple Photos application, in which ‘For You’ albums organize and (re)present images from a personal camera roll back to the viewer-user as a slideshow montage. Through a combination of technical analysis and auto-ethnography, it argues that the relation between stillness and motion in this instantiation of montage offers a productive way of understanding what it means to ‘see photographically’ within the contemporary socio-technical assemblages that comprise digital photography.

An exploration of latent space, generative AI, spirit photography, and the uncanny.