The Aesthetic Engine. Generative AI and the Politics of the Image

What kind of images does artificial intelligence produce, and what world do they make possible? This essay approaches these questions through the philosophy of Vilém Flusser, for whom aesthetic phenomena do not represent reality but constitute it. Reading contemporary generative AI through this lens reveals that, rather than expanding the horizon of the visible, these images promote a flattening of experience: reference to the real is supplanted by statistical circularity, historicity is transformed into a continuous present, image creation becomes increasingly entangled with military technologies, and the disruptive potential of beauty gives way to a vectorfascist, kitsch reality. Drawing on Vilém Flusser, Jonathan Beller, Grégory Chatonsky, the Taller Estampa collective, and Hito Steyerl, it unfolds through six interlocking movements that propose that generative images have become inseparable from what Steyerl calls “damage images”: that wound the very reality they claim to depict. They are built on precarious labor, they enable automated warfare, and they enclose perception in self-referential loops. Yet if image-making has become damage-making, perhaps art's task today is to make this entanglement visible: to turn the tools of surveillance against themselves, to expose what is erased, and to clear a space for what has not yet been imagined.