Aided, abetted, multiplied, burlesqued: Authorship, artificial intelligence and the poetics of the assemblage

This article examines the creative, aesthetic and ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence-assisted art-making through the lens of PandorasVamp , a visual project that extends the author’s performance persona Lola The Vamp into the machinic field of synthography. Drawing on poststructuralist theory, feminist critique and the historical avant-garde, the article argues that generative artificial intelligence does not erase authorship but reconfigures it as assemblage – a mode of creation entangled with prompt-craft, performance and cultural memory. The project’s visual outputs, generated using Wonder.ai and trained on a personal archive of stage and backstage imagery, occupy a historical moment in 2023 when glitch aesthetics and surreal distortions marked the infancy of public-access generative tools. Through curated example, theoretical synthesis and poetic reflection, PandorasVamp is offered not as a solution to the ethical conundrums of artificial intelligence art, but as a case study in reflexive entanglement – a co-authored sublime of aesthetic pleasure, cultural anxiety and vampiric recursion.