Review: <i>Cursed</i> , by Charlie Engman

On the cover of Cursed by Charlie Engman is an inset photo print of what appears to be a glass vase of tulip-pink and fried-egg shapes with a human head popping out of it. Either the body is encompassed within the jar or there is no body—the body is this vessel. The pot’s lid sits atop the head like a jaunty sailor’s cap tipping above downcast eyes and lips swollen as if Botoxed. A flash flare off the bulbous container signals its faux authenticity. The varnished, tipped-on print is trimmed in a purposefully nonrectilinear shape with the side edges forming the cutout negative space of opposing thumbs to make a figure-ground with the peach paper-wrapped cover. The reader’s perception may transfer awareness between the print and the outline of hands holding it. If your flesh is roughly the value Crayola used to call “Flesh” in the 1950s (before creating “Multicultural” skin tone sets in the 1990s) then your hands holding the book may perceptively fuse with the peach cover. Readers of another color will pose a starker contrast. It takes critical generosity to grant the skin tone pun for activating a meta-awareness that the material GenAI networks are trained on is biased toward bodies that default to peach being synonymous with beautiful, dreamy, or something else—as in “he’s a real peach.” Less charitably, if you don’t know AI had a part in the book’s making—and even if you do—its vexing affront of cover image and skin tone values may aim to entice through suggested sadism.Upon opening Cursed, the reader first encounters sumptuous, marbled papers matching the purples, pinks, and silvery tones of the cover picture. The paper signifies a classic, antiquated book for book’s sake. When asked on The Messy Truth podcast why this AI photo project is a book, Engman explains that he wanted Cursed to function the way an archetypical photobook operates: as a simple kind of poetry collection. He and most photographers creating books allude to the narrative potential of the form. Photobooks do present a limited set of images, and this can structure looking, since pictures neighbor others and are fixed in place. Engman speaks of pictures as disposable, particularly as we are scrolling through them near constantly within the tech infrastructure of attention capitalism. Such social media feeds are filled with so-called slop easily made by anyone with AI tools. Engman uses the book form to slow down the process of attention and change the relationship we have with pictures, particularly these “contrarian” ones made with GenAI image generators.Contemplation is the subject that comes through most in Cursed. The human-referencing subjects of pictures contemplate ceramic-looking busts of themselves. Hands mold faces out of melted wax. A pottery-looking head and face is fused onto a human-looking shoulder. Self-consciousness around what is made and who is doing the making abound in apparent search for the soul of AI. For this seeking to be done within the bounds of a book is relevant. In fact, looking back at books as a technology constructed from living organisms, their production history can seem as weird as and even relatable to the imagery in Cursed. Take early illuminated manuscripts, for example. A craftsperson would need a grisly, waist-high pile of animal pelts to make the vellum necessary to create a single thick volume. If you’ve ever seen the process of pressing and rolling these hides for flattening, scraping off the extant fur, having the skin drawn and quartered to stretch it before trimming it with a blade into folios that are gathered to be around the same size as paper we use today, then the twisting up of bodies, vessels, and animal parts in these pictures may seem less divergent or weird after all.Echoing sacred uses for these earlier tomes, many images in Cursed evoke devotional belief: prayer is throughout, as are baptisms; winged angels sink into puddles or stare out at the viewer; demons of evolution are part human, part fetal pig, attacking dog, or a head on a malformed creature; the miraculous found in commonplace occurrence—like the old tabloid covers documenting the visage of Jesus in the oil markings of a potato chip—are hoisted for a camera that isn’t truly there and devoid of any real button presser. Like any faith, users and makers of AI pray to an unknowable, unverifiable god. Read enough articles about GenAI network research and it’s clear that not even the engineers that build and train them believe they know all the ways these complex systems operate. Engman may be representing AI as religion, the way computer scientist and philosopher Jaron Lanier has written about it for over a decade: as overpromised, fake, and requiring an added layer of faith—from the venture capitalists and governments that fund its development, the tech engineers whose research and skills create it, down to users putting conviction in its outputs—to think it could save or destroy us.In this context Engman’s images are indeed revelatory—in the apocalyptic sense—for a reckoning with the god of capitalism in picture (and perhaps grander) terms. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari ask, after Antonin Artaud, “How do you make yourself a Body Without Organs (BwO)?”1 Artaud first declared war on the organs to escape God’s judgment because organs function as part of a jealous creator’s purpose. In relation, Deleuze and Guattari evoke the image of the egg: embryonic intensity where parts and organs are undifferentiated from the whole. An egg, or BwO, is adjacent to the organism, not before it—as in, What comes first, the chicken or the egg? Never yours or mine, the BwO is unsortable, without species, class, or type. What Engman seems to desire exploring is this embryonic, BwO condition. Evidently his prompts to the AI picture generator were for it to mix up parts of organisms with materials often used in prehistoric creation to reflect upon the present-future state of human-matter evolution. Yet the commercial picture and tech capitalism still dominate his creations and our attention to the sprouts of these capitalist organs throughout is inescapable.To understand the ontology of Cursed and why it’s aptly named, consider an analogy from a fantasy book series I read to my kid. At a very young age one of the characters lied to her grandmother, a witch. For her deception the child had a spell cast on her that required she henceforth answer any direct question truthfully. As she grew, the spell became so entwined with her existence that no witch, including the spell-casting grandmother, could undo it. The curse had become her and she the curse. We see in AI-generated images shades of stock photos, real estate documentation, social media posts, Wikimedia Commons figures, elements of design concept sketches, the rudiments of architectural mock-ups. AI models create smoothed-out impressions from these image types that they were trained on so while the resulting pictures are not exactly monstered together by a Dr. Frankenstein, the language-prompted results can’t help but reveal the truths of their former manufacture.Cursed, it appears, is meant to mirror back wrongly so we will see ourselves in the repugnant vulnerability of awaiting judgment. Engman includes a version of this funhouse mirror trope in his article “You Don’t Hate AI, You Hate Capitalism,” which was published in Art in America the month before Cursed was released. In it he describes his path from first getting sucked into an AI marketing trend to actively using it as an extension of his yearslong investigation into representation. Jinx, the main character of the fantasy series mentioned earlier, wishes to be in relation with the truth-cursed girl. To do so he has to manipulate himself to ask questions of her, obliquely. Likewise Engman acknowledges arguments about the pilfering of creators’ labor for the purposes of training GenAI networks but ultimately dismisses them, suggesting creative work has always been suffuse with mystery that hides the labor and laborers, whether they be underlayer painters in the old master’s studio, or untold ghost workers and people turking behind the scenes and earning far less than a minimum hourly wage to do the miniscule and sometimes traumatizing HITs (human intelligence tasks) that make AI acceptable for market. He deduces that everyone’s labor in all of society, in all previous eras, contributed to this collective point, making the question of who owns and is owed what impossible to parse. He simply recognizes “Some forms of labor are valorized more than others, and the metrics of this valorization are often unstated and rooted in murky, discriminatory logic.”2In The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property (2024), Eunsong Kim writes about scientific management theory, or Taylorism, creating a productivity-obsessed supervisory level over workers. Its development was instrumental when in 1917 Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain became mythically foundational for the avant-garde and his successors. To Kim, Duchamp foregrounded a class of artist managers lording over differently laboring, more traditional, creators and subjects. Cursed converges with Fountain through the image of a concave swan floating on bubbling oil-black and gray-blue waters. Foreshadowed and referenced periodically in its first two-thirds, the book crests at this image in what functions as the start of its final section. Whether Engman explicitly intended the readymade allusion or not, Cursed seems undoubtedly created in the mold that lionizes the conceptual recognition of potential in the everyday object (like the near instantaneously created GenAI image) raising it and the artist-seer out of the commons. As Kim argues:To assert that there are common objects waiting to be discovered by someone who can see their “potential” demonstrates the paradox that art historians, artists, and writers continue to make about the politics—and not the labor—of avant-garde art. The avant-garde artist is the artist against tradition, a position that is ethically and politically superior to the traditional artist, while simultaneously above the “common” and politically removed from work.3Engman’s alignment with tradition-breaking contrarianism and being above questions about labor gets the whole project stuck in the contradiction described by Kim. He authors a GenAI-made collection of images as an innovation thus giving him the power to break from creative workers but doesn’t claim power enough or responsibility for shifting the social or environmental consequences of AI. That falls to higher-order developer entities who we could collectively hold more responsible. “To truly understand, challenge, and reinvent technologies, we must engage with the social relationships that shaped them,” Engman argues, “recognizing that [GenAI] too is not a monolith but a tool continually shaped by our collective activity.”4Engman suggests that using GenAI tools “presents us with radical opportunities to self-reflect, confront uncertainty, and change.”5 While aspects of AI may indeed seem loathsome—as the images in Cursed make clear—Engman proposes that our disgust is telling. He uses the book as a familiar, even neutral ground to Trojan horse the difficulty within. Readers, believing this book to be a space for self-reflection and contemplation toward more awareness, may instead see our likeness inextricable from tech capitalism and thus inadvertently let more of its horribleness emerge from inside.