RELATED TERMS: Artificial Intelligence (AI); Hypomnesis, Hypermnesis and Anamnesis; Large Language Models; Photography; Pseudomnesia; Remembering: Mnemonics, Mnemotechne and Memory; [Historical Trauma; Intergenerational Trauma; Hauntology – Psychoanalysis]
Boris Eldagsen is a major proponent of a practice that he calls ‘promtography’ [1]. It differs from photography because, as Eldagsen explains, photography is writing with light and image creation with artificial intelligence is writing with verbal prompts that draw out digital visual content and visualisation techniques from prior image-making practices. Through his ‘promtography’, Eldagsen plays with the notion of pseudomnesia, a word formed from the Greek terms pseudes, meaning false, a-, meaning without, mnasthai, meaning to remember, and -ia, indicating a condition or a quality.
Eldagsen’s images or ‘promtographs’, are co-produced by the means of artificial intelligence (AI) image generators, in his case using DALL.E. They are imagined or envisioned by using language descriptors and re-edited between 20 to 40 times through AI image generators, combining such techniques as ‘inpainting’, ‘outpainting’ and ‘prompt whispering’.
Prompt Designer
Fashion brands now use AI to promote their collections, as discussed by Emily Cronin (2024). Models and settings are produced from detailed written prompts put into a generative image AI platform such as Midjourney, DALL.E, Stable Fusion or Adobe Firefly. Fashion items are then photographed and later edited into the AI generated images. This has led to the emergence of the role of ‘prompt designer’ whose skill is in crafting text prompts.
Promptography and Photography
Photographs provide a legitimacy and a concreteness in a way that verbal language does not. For Susan Sontag (2005, c.1973), for example, this leads to a presumption of veracity that lends photography its authority: that something exists, or did exist, which is like what is in the picture. Whatever the limitations of the individual photographer, in terms of skill and technique, a photograph seems to have a more straightforward, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than other entities that enact mimesis. In Barthes’ terms, someone who views a photograph assumes that some other person has seen the existent referent and created a mimetic recording as a medium by means of which a ‘there’ proceeds to touch me, who am ‘here’.
In part, this presumption may be explained by the fact that, prior to the emergence of colour television, streaming services, digital media and the Internet, photography dominated the visual field in the early- to mid-20th century through pictorial magazines, such as Picture Post and Illustrated London News in the UK, VU in France, Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung in Germany and Life and Look in the USA.
As Botescu-Sireteanu (2022: 96) puts it,
“The appeal of photography proved irresistible. People were inescapably drawn to the image and, all of a sudden, images became the story. By mid-20th century, major national and international publications would compete for the best photo that would make their front pages. By then, all great editors had already understood the force of a good photograph and the impact it could have on the readers. Text became secondary. The story was the image.”
Claims of photographic realism were central to such magazines’ images (Blakinger, 2012). For example, Henry R. Luce, creator of Life magazine and founder and editor-in-chief of Time Inc., considered the photographs in Life to have mimetic authenticity and an ability to legitimate the magazine’s truth claims. In the publication’s founding prospectus he explains that when Life “tells the story of [an] event it will do so with pictorial finality” (Baughman, 1987: 101)
For Wilson Hicks (1952), Life‘s first executive editor in charge of photography, the camera is a scientific instrument that can see like the eye. Indeed, Hicks thought that the camera was better than the eye because it has a “unique ability to capture reality, reality that hasn’t been tampered with, the reality that is.” Rather than simply ‘like being there,’ Hicks considers that a photograph is better than being there. It is more real than reality.
It is significant that this presumption of veracity persists, Capers (2003) notes, despite the development of digital photography that allows manipulation of photographic imagery through such programs as Photoshop. It is perhaps even more significant that it continues to exist despite the emergence of promtography, which creates images from a vast database of stored visual content and pictorial techniques, through such platforms as DALL.E and MidJourney. Promptography would seem radically to challenge the presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what is in the picture.
Indeed, the presumption in promptography might almost seem to be the polar opposite: there does not exist, nor did ever exist, anything which is like what is in the picture. The promptographic image nevertheless remains intelligible. The mimetic relation shifts a gear: What you see is like what you might have seen in prior mimetic media, such as photographs or paintings. It is a meta-mimesis that works with existing media forms and techniques, not ‘referents’ that are in some simple sense ‘there’. There is no simple ‘being-in-front-of’ or ‘being-in-the-presence-of’ that is recorded and passed on unadulteratedly.
Capers (2003) cautions that this is not to suggest that photographs do not have other meanings or functions than mimesis, nor that these other meanings have not been explored, but simply to point out the strong presupposition as to the photograph’s status that has to be overcome and that may stand in the way of alternative understanding of photographs’ unfolding.
Questions for Design Practice
Emily Cronin (2024) quotes Marco De Vincenzo, the creative director of the brand Etro, as saying of creative use of AI that, “It’s modifying reality, but that’s what every creative [person] tries to do. It’s our job to try to escape and experiment, every day. Sometimes reality is not enough.”
The question, then, concerns to what extent it can be argued that creating an image through promptography modifies ‘reality’. Perhaps this can be taken as an elliptical statement. Promptography modifies photography. Photography is a dominant form of image production and one which often stands for ‘realism’, as ‘accurate depiction’, as expressed in the phrase ‘photo-realistic’.
Promptographs can be ‘mistaken’ for photographs, that is, perceived and interpreted as if they were photographs. Such ‘mistakes’ can have an effect on what we perceive as real, by altering the parameters of the interpretation of an accepted medium, such as photography. For example, photography can no longer be taken simply as a register of a momentary ‘real’. As a media construct, it has an element of fiction that is not secondary to its assumed primary realism.
So, in a sense, it could be argued that promptography alters photography. In doing so, it creates a double path of perception and interpretation. On the one hand, a promptograph looks as if it is a photograph, depicting or capturing a certain ‘real’ scenario in which all the visual elements are present to each other in the moment. One can take it as ‘real’. On the other hand, it has been created through textual prompts that draw responses from an existing cultural database that includes language, images and the rules for generating ‘text’ in both verbal and imagistic forms. It creates an interchangeability between word and image. It is both ‘real’, an aesthetic ‘reading’ borrowed from photography, and alters the ‘real’ by introducing elements from a range of other scenarios from within the database not present to each other in any prior, pre-existing moment. The momentary scenario ‘exists’ only through the interaction of the prompts and the database.
Perhaps we might say: the use of AI in the form of promptography alters an existing set of aesthetic techniques of interpreting images by altering an existing medium (photography) which we had assumed captures and articulates moments of the ‘real’, as snapshots from an ongoing worldly flow. The impact of this alteration is to disturb our perception of the ‘real’ by altering a medium that we have used to characterise, represent or materialise that perception, to give it some stability, commonality and communicability: photography as an element in a ‘social imaginary’, to use a phrase that Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (2017, 2019) has employed when discussing how designs work on a given public.
In De Vincenzo’s terms, the suggestion seems to be that we ‘escape’ from the ‘real’ and enter into a kind of ‘fantasy’, a ‘more-than’ the real, a hyper-real: “Sometimes reality is not enough”. This may be understood as ‘entertainment’, as distraction, as ‘passing the time’, or as the ‘research’ phase of making a purchase.
However, it may also be grasped, by engaging with the promptograph as ‘phantasm’ in the psychoanalytic sense, as a means of examining recurrent themes pertaining to ghostly transmission in the cultural database, an unearthing of the things that we would much rather hide or lay to rest (Frosh, 2013): a recalling of that which has passed away, that which is passing away, that which is passing through and that which is passed on. Sometimes reality is not enough. Sometimes reality is too much.
For design practice, the ‘location’ of the design intervention shifts, from techniques based in photographic production, manipulation and editing to techniques based in database prompting through dialogue. Access to the image in some paradoxical way is gained through language or, at least, the word-image relation is altered, reframing the concept of ‘language’. This is indeed a serious modification of reality.
Notes
[1] In coming up with this term, in a profile piece by Marie-Flore Pirmez (2024), Eldagsen acknowledges Peruvian photographer Christian Vinces who suggested the term ‘promptographer’ to mean an artist who uses prompting technology and AI to create images. Eldagsen liked the term because it refers to the mode of production of images using AI.
References
Barthes, R. (1981) Camera lucida: reflections on photography. Translated by R. Howard. New York, NY: Hill and Wang.
Baughman, J. L. (1987). Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American News Media. Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers.
Blakinger, J. R. (2012) “Death in America” and “Life” magazine: Sources for Andy Warhol’s “Disaster” paintings, Artibus et Historiae, 33(66), pp. 269–285. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23509753 (Accessed: 27 August 2024).
Botescu-Sireteanu, I. (2022) Death as disaster: Andy Warhol’s aesthetics of catastrophe, University of Bucharest Review: Literary and Cultural Studies Series, 12(1), pp. 93–103. doi: 10.31178/UBR.12.1.6.
Capers, B. (2003) On Andy Warhol’s Electric Chair, California Law Review, 94, pp. 243–260.
Cronin, E. (2024). ‘Sometimes reality is not enough’. Financial Times, 17 August. Available at: https://www.ft.com/content/af2752e8-d409-40d4-b415-820df0fbedf9 [Accessed 19 August 2024]
Frosh, S. (2013) Hauntings: psychoanalysis and ghostly transmissions. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ginsberg, A. D. (2017) Better: Navigating imaginaries in design and synthetic biology to question “Better” [PhD thesis]. Royal College of Art. Available at: https://www.daisyginsberg.com/work/writing-curation (Accessed: 17 August 2024).
Ginsberg, A. D. and Stratford, O. (2019) Nested betters: “Don’t look at the folder called fake tits” [An interview with Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg], Disegno, 24, pp. 155–164.
Hicks, W. (1952) Words and pictures: an introduction to photojournalism. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers Publishers.
Mitchell, W. J. (1991) The Reconfigured eye: visual truth in the post photographic era. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mohamadi, A. (2023?) Corrupted memory: photography in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), Academia.edu. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/104437080 Corrupted_memory_Photography_in_the_Age_of_Artificial_Intelligence_AI (Accessed: 27 December 2023).
Pirmez, M-F. (2024?). Boris Eldagsen, a disruptive promptographer. KingKong, 11.05. Available at https://kingkong-mag.com/en/boris-eldagsen/ [Accessed 19 August 2024].
Sontag, S. (2005, c.1973) On photography. New York, NY: Rosetta Books.
Williams, Z. and Eldagsen, B. (2023) ‘“AI isn’t a threat” – Boris Eldagsen, whose fake photo duped the Sony judges, hits back [Interview with Boris Eldagsen]’, Guardian (18 April). Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/apr/18/ai-threat-boris-eldagsen-fake-photo-duped-sony-judges-hits-back (Accessed: 27 December 2023).
Sources
Website: Boris Eldagsen, Pseudomnesia: https://www.eldagsen.com/pseudomnesia/
Audio interview: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0fhchpt
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