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Bodies in digital transition presentation outline

Bodies in digital transition presentation notes 

INTRO 

  • Introduction to who I am, practice-based PhD, Arts and Computational Technology,  Goldsmiths 

  • V Short introduction to my practice, focusing on personal practice: a magpie-ish relationship with style, often moving between registers e.g. performance work with Irini which copied copy-pasta, video work focused on the gothic and medicine, folk tales and 

  • Interest in authorship, collective authorship:  

  • In-grid works with collective authorship, and uses a lot of collective writing practices 

  • Working under pseudonym (G George) 

  • Interested in that as 1. a freeing practice 2. a communal practice 3. how borrowing visual and textual signifiers can shortcut to understanding 

  • Introduce basis of PhD: how authorship can be conceptualised when working with techniques including appropriation and pastiche, and how working with AI-generated content complicates these issues further. 

THE MEAT 

  • Propose reading this condition through the gothic: a genre historically preoccupied with unstable authorship, from Walpole’s fraudulent framing of The Castle of Otranto as a found manuscript onward, and with architectures of hidden, unindexed space, doubles, dopplegangers and secret histories. (see also the Woman in White, The King in Yellow, Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde etc) 

  • Short overview of why I’m interested in the gothic and how it is defined:  

  • Cross disciplinary: Film, literature, fashion, music 

  • Slippery in definition, and difficult to apply to visual arts 

  • Horror community and fan culture, space for the queer uncanny 

  • The economics of horror 

  • Specific gothic tropes of generational secrets, misauthored/misinterpreted text, obsession, recurrance (history repeating itself), doubles and dopplegangers 

  • Artifice and theatricality, deliberate gaslighting/misleading of the protagonist 

  • Can these tropes be pivoted to describe something happening in generative system assisted works? 

  • Linking to genAI and authorship  

  • Style and trope surfacing in GenAI output with no traceable citation or intent behind them 

  • Not framed as theft or loss, framed as strange, genuinely uncanny: a return without a returning subject 

  • Appropriation/pastiche/dĂ©tournement are knowing practices with articulated relations to source; fan cultures copy communally and citationally; GenAI’s recurrence has neither of these features. It’s a different kind of copying, and does that have its own potentials?  

  • 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 dĂ©tournement? Can GenAI become a tool for productive misreading rather than passive extraction? 

  • In a system which is obscured from us – a castle of locked doors and empty crypts – can we make something in the gaps? 

  • This difference in practice and potential practice is the interesting object, not a verdict or a moral position. 

CONCLUSION 

  • Finish in a space of uncertainty: is this something to mourn, exploit, ignore, notice? 

  • Can this be directed like detournment or does this import too much intentionality on an opaque process  

  • Open questions:  

  • Where’s the line between an artist’s generative process (however loosely I control it) and something closer to appropriation, when I can’t see inside the model? 

  • Does calling this “gothic” romanticise infrastructure that is extractive? 

  • Can a practice of dĂ©tournement exist without a stable object being dĂ©tourned? 

  • What would it even mean for a generative system to cite?