Notes:
Interstices: Research (in) the gaps
Gaps between social cultural and computational structures What moves through them and do they carry transformative power?
The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet investigates how intelligence–human and artificial–manifests under conditions of secrecy, hostility, and concealment.
Different spaces of habitation
for Konior, the dark forest is increasingly inhabited by other-than-human intelligences that opt for non-engagement with people.
Intended contribution/abstract and relevance to workshop (200 words)
This paper begins with a haunting. When GenAI systems produce moving/image work, style and narrative convention recur without traceable citation. Appropriation, pastiche, and détournement are established practices with critically articulated relationships to their sources. Fan cultures also copy knowingly, openly, and communally, building shared vocabularies of reference [1]. GenAI systems, by contrast, reproduce convention as a byproduct of obscurely curated data models, an interstitial site the structure produces but does not claim. Original contexts are hidden behind this broader opacity that Konior [2] locates in AI systems more widely, where concealment rather than disclosure becomes a mark of intelligence itself.
Rather than treating this only as a loss of authorial control, I want to ask what it opens up. Can this ownerless recurrence be redirected into appropriation in its fullest sense, as deliberate remix or détournement? Can GenAI become a tool for productive misreading rather than passive extraction?
I propose reading this condition through the gothic: a genre historically preoccupied with unstable authorship, from Walpole’s [3] fraudulent framing of The Castle of Otranto as a found manuscript onward, and with architectures of hidden, unindexed space, doubles, dopplegangers and secret histories.
[1] Abby Kirby, “Examining Collaborative Fanfiction: New Practices in Hyperdiegesis and Poaching,” Humanities 11 (2022): 87.
[2] Bogna Konior, The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Cambridge: Polity, 2025).
[3] Guy Debord and Gil Wolman, “A User’s Guide to Détournement” (1956).
[4] Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764).
Details of current research project (100 words)
I am in the early stages of a practice-based PhD in Arts and Computational Technology at Goldsmiths, University of London. The research traces how fine artists working in moving image and photography inherit, appropriate, and pastiche cinematic genre and how GenAI complicates that inheritance, returning style and trope without an author to claim them. The research is grounded in a magpie-ish personal arts practice which moves between registers without settling into a single voice. The project reads this condition through the gothic: haunting, forgery, and unstable authorship as tools for thinking through what it means to work with a system that copies without knowing it copies.
Biography
Katie Tindle is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher and founder member of In-grid: a London-based trans * feminist collective of artists/educators/technologists working in and around digital infrastructure. She is a lecturer in Computational Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, and where she is also currently a Doctoral Candidate and member of the Process Iteration Network. She also teaches at University of Arts London, BA Fine Art: Computational Art.