This presentation echoes some of my career findings, along with research done in my CCA class Machinic Modernity, run with Ignacio Valero who is a philosopher and social scientist. It is a class that I give as much as I take it.

This is a short list of concerns that many of us probably share.
The main concerns of this talk are: the prompt terms “Imagine, generate, create, etc. “ in the hands of generative AI,  with artificiality & consciousness, and critical thinking & education. “What does graphic design got to do with this?” is a question we ask throughout.

This talk is structured in three parts.

1/  The big picture: from the real to reality    

2/  The image: being and becoming

3/  Engagement by design:  through dialectics, critical thinking, & image output

This is an overview of the class. We use theoretical essays to explore the relationships between REALITY and the real, as per Lacan, or the true world as per Nietzsche, or the real world as per Baudrillard
With A we postulate that the REAL WORLD is our being
B: is the combo of DESIGN & IMAGE as our becoming,
and the combo of A & B is REALITY

This is a 1967 quote by Guy Debord during the rise of mass media. The polarity between experience and representation is more central than ever.  To make sense of it we must deconstruct both the meanings of THE LIVED and that of REPRESENTATION. These are the matters we work on in most design disciplines, and what we explore in our Machinic Modernity class.

Let’s start with THE REAL as the origin of life ranging from the constellations, the bodies we are born with, and everything in between. We can consider the real is the primal matter humans can work and create from. For the last 200k years or more we have turned the real into things, tools, and symbols. The SENSES, encounter these designed “EXPRESSIONS”. Then the brain processes them as sensations and interpretations which is what reveals what we can know as “image”.

If the mind is the fabric of image, we must consider how very much conditioned it is by the four drivers of culture, ethics, and especially commerce and technology. 

The output of “images” is what produces REALITY, which is itself made of millions of realities attempting to coexist.
There “real world” and “reality” become interdependent as do experience and representation.
The real world then becomes a part of reality as it is often commodifies into parks, mines. fields or realestate, when not landfills.

Aristotle’s hylomorphism is a metaphysical view of matter & form which is a way to think about things.
• The real world, that is earth, water, air, & fire and all primal matter and all of our origins.
• Technology is intelligence & processing. Broadly speaking, it is all that we live with including language.
• Reality/image is medium & meaning. “Medium” is imaginary if we talk about a mental image.
• The modern human is a design construct so we can combine them as body & soul.
Hylomorphism also applies to images.

The term IMAGE has many meanings. In this talk I mostly refer to these top three interpretations.

Paleolithic Art implies that we not only established ourselves above other species through image, we also invented the idea that we can visually “represent” anything that is outside of our “cave”.  Furthermore it introduces the idea of the “negative space” between the symbols inside the cave, and the real world outside. There is always a separation between subject and representation. It is these three aspects that together form the image.
That separation is the substance of Plato’s Allegory Of The Cave, as it describes our apparent reality as a falsified image of the real world, and a negative impact on the formation of our mental images. It echoes today’s “great simulacrum” as introduced by Jean Baudrillard.

In the 17th century, we have long moved out of caves to enter the age of Modernity with its democratization of things, knowledge and images. In that century, the Dutch republic alone produced an estimated 5 million works by 50,000 painters. The image has become design. This 1636 baroque Dutch-styled vanitas by Antonio de Pereda for Spain’s King Philip IV depicts the usual accumulation of earthly goods and achievements. It is the symbolic image of someone’s existence, on its way to death but empowered by great achievements, above other mere mortals.

Next to the skull is “Nil omne”, meaning “All is nothing”. As a vanitas it is meant for the client. But from a 21st century perspective, we can see it as a vanitas for humanity, as well as for image itself, as it may be timeless, or fleeting if it is not protected. As we all know, an image in what it displays can be beautiful while lethal to the real, and to truth.
This is a reminder that the image has a life and  power of its own.

Now, nearly a century after Water Benjamin, image has become rhizomatic and is distributed in the millions in all mediums, media and modalities. Also referring to Benjamin is the notion of the AURA which is now electronic and potentially universal.
With scientific innovations, the image has also become purely technological with no intervention from the human retina nor brain.

The idea of AI, or Artificial General Intelligence AI is not new. It is us who are new to it.
AI will outpace its creators and it will outpace our grasp of image—.if it has not already done so. And that along with all the dazzling, the enchantment, and the uncanny will in a way bring us deeper in the cave we have never left.
AI is the ontological turn of our times.

To conclude on the nature of image. In its own way it is autonomic and therefore impossible to fully frame: For each type of image, there is always a “post-image” in the making.
The post-image evolves toward ever new materialities, and sensory modalities. We never know how it is going to show up and from where.
The post-image naturally invites enchantment which is always in what is new and surprising to us.

Back to the question of experience vs. representation: To structure our investigation, we have identified five interrelated domains or ecosystems being: Modernities, technologies, life, objects, and selfhood which is at once the start and end of the cycle. 

These domains relate through ever shifting transversalities. Artificiality, consciousness and language are current ones.
In this relational context we may ask of Artificial intelligence what kind of tedious task it will free us from? Perhaps design itself? And thinking? For the better?

This is the materiality of our class: list of interests and thought leaders and ideas in mediums ranging from books, essays and films. A broad overview allow us to see how concepts come to life. The main ones of these past year are in yellow. Ignacio Valero is my co-teacher so his voice is important, but the voice of student is what we aim to reveal.
We focus on critical thinking from our point of view as graphic designers. 

In the next slides I will show expressions of our five domains as revealed through various theories and formal expressions. These are the cultures we inhabit.
The promises of Modernity is a dominant driver of our conflicted world. It has been sold and imposed through centuries of colonization. 

Technology is the other driver. So much so that we are now homotechnologicus.
With AI, technology that may soon acquire human-like abilities. in that sense, AI is not just another Deus Ex Machina disruption and in fact it may be more disrupting than all previous innovation put together, hence why we can think of it as an ontological turn.

We can take Modernity and technology for granted but we no longer can operate solely from a human-centered perspective.
With climate change, the notion of LIFE is finally understood as central to our very survival. Artificial life is another force to explore and understand.

Jean Baudrillard’s words, "now is the revenge of the object." As we saw a shift from human-centered design toward all of the living, we see a shift from subject to object, with the notions such as the Internet of things, and especially the notion of  Object-Oriented Ontology that grants inherent existence to things. The notion of Hyperobjects exists at another level, for things we can barely grasp but make up our environment, like climate change, the Solar system, or the Internet.

SELFHOOD is the value through which we measure our human centered culture, where we are dividuals, that is fragmented and quantified users with commodified dividualities. With selfhood we must also consider our deep innerselves, the animal world, the planet, our gods, and surely the next machines, and our becoming as machinic beings. In this mix, the question of consciousness is paramount.

This is showing five approaches to the research phase. It is the most important part of the class since it is where we dissect the domains and identify topics of interest to explore.
The form of the research can take multiple forms, whether as texts, diagrams, mood boards and other.

The research relates to a thesis where, students are challenged to make a case for the concerns they have selected. The quality of translation from theory to semantics and semiotic visual expressions becomes an important objective. Again, visual vernacular and techniques of representation are wide open. This is showing an overview of twelve projects but I will only show four recent examples today.

Leah Ray’s project focuses on Modernity and its concerns, which we could consider as externalities. 

This large diagrammatic poster operates a bit like a performance. At first it seems clinical and modern yet light and atmospheric, even celestial.
The core statement in the bottom is like a concrete slab, with the heavy weight of "CONCERNS" aiming both upward and downward in a sort of precarious stasis.
One has to come forward into the poster to explore the topics, where you cannot see the whole anymore. The floating topics and threads convey the huge space of the unknown between the promises of progress and the concerns and questions to come.
The questions appear in a clouded sky, implying unpredictable climates. The questions relate to the five color-coded domains of research.

The last question is: “In our quest to solve the mystery of life in the universe, have we neglected to take responsibility for living systems on Earth first, especially when our activities may be accelerating the ecological collapse of the planet?” and that leads us to the next project in this lecture.

Here is an ambitious thesis by Ricardo Perez on the representation of industrial pollution as a hyperobject. He made what he calls Biological Counterfeits Technofossils whose names are loaded with physicality with terms like Tusks, Lamp & Debris, Deformed Cross. Note Bauhaus reference that was a major reference in this class. 

He simultaneously conceived his Technofossils as virtual objects and then physical 3D versions.
Later the objects were set in a 3D world that operates as a diagram of his research and as a virtual landfill. There Ricardo made nine conceptual video landscapes.

Here is a concept poster for the project showing technofossils as fumes. Note how he justifies his somewhat extreme proposition under the notion of “different epistemologies”. Ricardo also created a book with sophisticated texts.

Starting from the notion of Object Oriented Ontology, Zhuo Wang approaches the realm of Trash.

This typical Figma research diagram illustrates the complex existence of objects and how that leads to her theory introduced on the right.
In the right part of the diagram (framed in red) she introduces her theory that things hold memories of who used them and how. We know this can be true with the Internet Of Things and other Smart Things but her project remains metaphysical, with references to the afterlife of things when they are discarded while retaining their secrets.

Her concept representation is made of rough sketches, only focusing on the idea of things and what they stand for, beyond their materialities. The idea itself is here is made somewhat material since these are meant as actual drawings on paper. Meaning that they are objects.

Her thesis lands  on this enlightening speculation where trees become the host of buried things literally in coffins, while sharing the very secrets they hold with the trees.  We could hear the secrets if we knew the language of trees.

Our class projects are fast paced so the form factor can be pretty loose as we see here.

This other one from Leah Ray is only a one-week project, on the topic of THE OBJECT. She shows how the research phase can produce an expression of its own.

This concept explores how images (in all spaces) mediate our understanding of the physical world, potentially leading to a disconnection from real objects. 

The research is loaded with references combining the material, the immaterial, the semantic, the semiotic, the commercial, the cultural, the real, the fisticious and other aspects. 

In the background a Buddha is shown as a statue on the left and as pixelated noise on the right. It is a reminder that an image can appear as both a real world material thing and as an abstract immaterial entity—as "true" object and as a fiction of itself.

Celia’s project is set as a 24 page graphic novel but it became an important exhibit at the SFO Museum which was a perfect place not just for a Chinese student but also for a Machinic Modernity project since it is a point of transition between cultures, time zones, languages and surely ways of being and becoming.

The project includes diptychs that are exploring differeThe project includes diptychs that are exploring different aspects of what appears like an alienated existence with personas, dramas, environments, and languages.
Together, the diptychs establish her dual existence in the real world and in the digital one. A sort of dissociative identity disorder. The iconography is the same digital vernacular. The human eye on the right and robotic one on the right are equally synthetic. These appear like parallel worlds, one made of plastic and the other of digits. Both are unstructured and alienating.

In this diptych, from her journal, she combines her demultiplied online persona with a crowd of anonymous avatars. On one side is her virtual boyfriends and on the other her disconnected self. 

In these dual spreads she combines her designs and her notes: “Then I tried to explore how these destructions are formed and why humans can construct emotional connections with non-humans. […] Also I began to think about the constitution of humans and non-humans, and why emotional connections can be constructed between two completely different constituted objects.”

In these last spreads a poem appears both in ascii and her hand writing.  Note the words: “those who are connected to me. they are so happy satisfied. If so, then it doesn’t matter if I am virtual or not, right?”
On the right page, her body is held by what might be a posthuman.  And on the right spread, it is no longer a body that is being held but another poem jumbled by code-like expressions. The disembodied hands nearly seem like they come out of a database of body parts as the ones on the left.