This essay examines the emergence of AI image-generating technology through Maria Loh’s lens of reproductive Baroque pastiche. It argues that the appearance of chimeric, anatomical composites in AI-generated images are not mere computational errors but a critical node between statistical representation and embodied vision. By comparing algorithmic image-making to Baroque pastiche, the study identifies AI-generated images as a critical node for negotiating the dialectics between cultural anxieties and ethical dilemmas. Through visual analysis of emblematic AI-generated works such as “Edmond de Belamy” alongside the Etruscan Chimaera of Arezzo, mediaeval bestiaries, East Asian pseudo-human creatures, Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, and other historical representations of hybridity, the essay traces the continuities and departures in how monstrosity has been visualised. Hito Steyerl’s “mean images” and Amy Adler’s “artificial authenticity supplement the consideration of how algorithmic pathologies in AI-generated images interrogate traditional notions of authorship and authenticity, revealing a legal substratum ill-equipped to address the ontological ambiguities and accountability of machine creativity vis-à-vis the negotiating boundaries between human and algorithm agency in contemporary visual culture. The potentially numbing and essentialising effect of AI-generated visual material widens the gap between visually literate and lay audiences. As such, the visually monstrous emerges as a site of both peril and possibility in interrogating art history’s methodological assumptions for the advocacy of an interdisciplinary, reflexive governance. The historicisation of algorithmic monstrosity thus advances a historically grounded but technically attuned framework for the consideration of machine creativity as a human endeavour.

Authors:
So Yin Tam, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

About the Presenter(s)
So Yin Dilys Tam is reading for a Master of Studies in the History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of Oxford. She will commence her PhD studies at The University of Chicago in the Fall, focusing on the nexus of art history and law.

Connect on Linkedin
https://hk.linkedin.com/in/dilys-tam-212193181

See this presentation on the full schedule – Saturday Schedule

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