2024/05/16 by Liam Magee, Magee, Liam, Vanicka Arora +1
Arts and Humanities · #Computers and Society (cs.CY) #Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature #FOS: Computer and information sciences #J.5 #K.4.2
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2405.09734
openalex publication_date 2024/05/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This chapter experiments with ways computational vision interprets and synthesises representations of the Anthropocene. Text-to-image systems such as MidJourney and StableDiffusion, trained on large data sets of harvested images and captions, yield often striking compositions that serve, alternately, as banal reproduction, alien imaginary and refracted commentary on the preoccupations of Internet visual culture. While the effects of AI on visual culture may themselves be transformative or catastrophic, we are more interested here in how it has been trained to imagine shared human, technical and ecological futures. Through a series of textual prompts that marry elements of the Anthropocenic and Australian environmental vernacular, we examine how this emergent machinic gaze both looks out, through its compositions of futuristic landscapes, and looks back, towards an observing and observed human subject. In its varied assistive, surveillant and generative roles, computational vision not only mirrors human desire but articulates oblique demands of its own.