Heated debates surrounding images (videos, sounds, texts) generated by artificial intelligence reveal our fears that the non-human entities we create will emancipate themselves and escape our control. The familiar narrative of the Golem or robot stories is repeated once again. However, the concern does not seem to be primarily about the simulacratic artificiality of AI-generated images. After all, we have all become accustomed to the digital images brought about by the Digital Revolution. The crux of the matter seems to be that the machine is transitioning from a tool to an agent in creative processes. AI art challenges our concepts of originality, individual style, and creativity.

Scandal As an Artistic Intervention into the System

JH     Your rejection of the Sony World Photography Award 2023 for the work "PSEUDOMNESIA  | The Electrician" gained significant global media attention. What motivated you to confront the introduction of AI-generated images into the world of photography?

BE     By rejecting the award after winning, I wanted to make a clear statement: this is not photography as we’ve traditionally understood it, and we need to address this distinction openly and transparently. My motivation was never to scandalise for the sake of controversy but to spark an important and overdue conversation about the role of AI in photography and art. I wanted to test whether the industry was prepared to distinguish between traditional photography and AI-generated imagery—and, frankly, it wasn’t.

JH    It reminds me of the scandal caused by the Paris-based art collective Obvious, which, in 2018, sold the AI-generated digital print "Portrait of Edmond Belamy", created using a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) algorithm, at Christie's auction house in New York, and debates about the nature of art and the role of AI in creative processes it sparked. Or the classic digital artwork by Cornelia Solfrank, "Female Extension" from 1997, a critical response to the Hamburger Kunsthalle's Extension competition for net art. Just as you aimed to draw attention to the new rules of the game in response to the appearance of AI-generated images, Solfrank, by revealing her intervention at the museum's press conference, drew attention to the exclusion of women in digital art spaces and questioned the traditional emphasis on individual creators.

BE    My approach was inspired by the mindset of ethical hackers—those who test systems not to exploit them but to reveal their vulnerabilities—as a way of encouraging dialogue and awareness. Just as hackers expose weaknesses in digital systems, I wanted to expose how unprepared the photography world is for the rise of AI-generated imagery.

JH    Scandals in the art world have always been associated with protests against norms and have contributed to the promotion and development of new artistic directions and ideas. Do you consider AI art a new artistic medium?

BE    I see AI art not as a new medium but as a new tool. It is a new way of creating file types that already exist. This is why AI art is exhibited conventionally as prints, videos, sculptures, text, and sound. Algorithms can be considered the medium because they form the core mechanism through which creative expression occurs. AI could then be viewed as the overarching framework or tool that enables access to these algorithms. This raises an interesting question: What do we mean when we talk about art media today?

JH    I see AI as another upgrade of the “memory machine” concept, and AI art as a field of artistic investigations of memory functions with AI software—including displacement, rewriting, free association, dreaming, false memories or hallucinations. On the other hand, in the (digital) humanities, there is AI implemented with the vision that it will help to remove the interpreting subject—with its opinions, preferences, and biases—in favour of a critical and objective study of history conceived as an endless stream of returning motifs and patterns. Or as an extension of the human mind, enabling us to overcome the limits of human memory capacity by automated analysis of cultural heritage in the scope of big data.

AI Art: Between Prompt and Visual Response

JH    As an intermedia artist, you might perceive more than others that AI art is, rather than a new technical image, an intermedium—emerging somewhere between the prompt and the visual response of AI software. Even your description of the image "PSEUDOMNESIA | The Electrician" resembles more a prompt than a description of what we see in the picture: “a haunting black-and-white portrait of two women from different generations, reminiscent of the visual language of 1940s family portraits.” How would you define AI art, or “promptography”?

BE    Promptography uses AI systems like Flux or MidJourney, where prompts replace cameras as the primary tool of creation. The AI uses algorithms trained on vast datasets to interpret the prompts and create images pixel by pixel based on probabilities and patterns. Promptography is akin to painting or drawing with algorithms—it generates entirely new visual realities based on learned archetypes from training data. The subjects in promptography never existed; they are mathematical constructs shaped by probability and artistic direction.

JH    As a photographer who is now intensively involved in AI art (promptography), you have direct experience with both media and can compare the way you work with them. How would you describe the difference between authorship in the case of photography and the case of AI-generated art?

BE    In photography, the artist makes deliberate choices about framing, lighting, timing, and subject matter. The camera is a tool that extends the photographer’s vision. In AI-generated art, the artist provides input (prompts, datasets, parameters), but the AI system generates the image autonomously, often in ways that are not fully predictable or transparent. The artist’s role shifts from director to curator or collaborator.

JH    According to Peter Weibel, it is the invention of photography that marks the moment in the history of art which started the emancipation process of artistic means and creative processes. It was the photographer who first left the creative act of image production to the machine (camera), and since then, technical images have developed towards autonomy from humans in various aspects. AI art, as another stage of machine art evolution, might be understood as a descendant of photography, then. Unlike photography, AI art has freed itself from the task of recording external reality in favour of "deep dreaming" or "hallucinating" content from its own unconscious machine memory.  

BE    AI has looted the visual vocabulary of photography—its light, composition, and texture—and turned it into a depersonalised resource. This aesthetics, once rooted in the physical world (light hitting film, a moment frozen by a human eye), are now mere data points for algorithms to exploit. Style, in this context, becomes a disposable mask. AI wears it without understanding the history, struggle, or cultural weight behind it. An artist’s personal style used to be their identity. Now, "style" becomes a parlour trick, a karaoke of visual culture: everyone gets a turn at the mic, but the song isn’t theirs. It’s a hollow gesture divorced from its origins. The myth of the artist’s "unique voice" collides with the infinite remix.

JH    I like the metaphor of AI as a means of “infinite remix”. I often think about AI as a means that has accelerated postmodern creative strategies such as remake, remix, postproduction or appropriation. Current AI tools take this combinatorial, playful or intellectual game of references and intertextual links to the next level of “regenerative remix” and “meta-creativity” (Eduardo Navas). By not acknowledging this relationship but masking it with endlessly generating variants of the same, posing as innovation, digitised collections of memory institutions have been transformed into raw data to be exposed in brutalist avalanches of digital matter (see, for example, Refik Anadol's installations).

BE    Smart artists will use AI for what it does well—mimicry and mutation—and then take it further, toward ideas the machine by itself couldn’t conceive. In that sense, style in the AI era moves from owning a style to how you play with style, how you subvert it or recombine it into something meaningful. Having said this, the work of an artist is not just about style. It is about a topic that is driving the artist’s life, feelings, and thoughts. It is there where a unique style emerges from the psychological make-up of an artist. Style can be copied, yes, but meaning and context are harder to steal. In this era, an artist’s concept, curation, and courage to push boundaries will distinguish them more than a signature look.

Medium Is a Message

JH    You describe your work as research of the "unconscious mind through visual poetry that combines the sublime and the uncanny." Could you elaborate?

BE    You quote a description of my photographic work from the past decades. The sublime and the uncanny had been coordinates between which my artistic research moved. For Kant, the sublime was nature’s vastness—glaciers, storms, starry voids—that overwhelms our senses, forcing us to confront the limits of human reason. Freud’s “unheimlich”—the uncanny—is the familiar made strange, the repressed crawling back into the light.

JH    Whose “unconscious mind” is it, man or machine?

BE    The description referred to my unconscious mind. And to the timeless embedded structure in which we perceive the world, that C. G. Jung called the collective unconscious. AI is also a collective unconscious; its vast training data is a mirror of humankind. This parallel explains why I embrace AI as a tool: my artistic focus stays the same (the unconscious), but now I can work with a tool that is also a representation of my focus. The machine’s latent space is a hallucinatory void where it hoards patterns from billions of images, none of which it truly understands. It’s unconsciousness without a psyche—a statistical ghost.

JH    Are the attributes "sublime" and "uncanny" that you use to describe your work generally valid for AI art, in your opinion?

BE    I don’t think that the majority of AI work is sublime or uncanny. I think the majority is “kitsch,” poor in taste due to its perceived lack of originality, depth or artistic integrity.

JH    I am afraid you are right. And how do these attributes manifest in your work?

BE    They manifest as a trigger. Many people tell me that they can’t get a work of mine out of their head, that sometimes it returns in their dreams. What more can you expect from a work of art?

JH    Your project "PSEUDOMNESIA  | The Electrician" mimics the visual language of the 1940s and evokes false memories of the past. Creating fictional history or a speculative approach to the past is also addressed by Austrian artist Claudia Larcher. She received an award at the Ars Electronica festival in 2024 for her work addressing gender imbalance in history, "AI and the Art of Historical Reinterpretation – Filling Gender Bias Gaps". Building on this example, let me ask: Will AI change our relationship to the past and the way we write histories?

BE    We’ve always mythologised the past, but AI weaponises that impulse. It doesn’t just reinterpret history; it generates synthetic evidence—deepfakes of dead leaders, photorealistic hoaxes of events that never happened, archival styles mimicked so perfectly they blur fact and fiction. The past becomes a prompt, a malleable fiction. This isn’t progress. It’s a crisis of memory. Photography once promised objectivity—a “this has been” (as Barthes said)—but AI severs that indexical thread. Future generations won’t inherit a shared past; they’ll inherit competing hallucinations. History becomes a battleground of plausibility, where truth is determined by aesthetic coherence, not evidence. The danger isn’t that we’ll lose the past. It’s that we’ll stop caring whether it ever existed at all.

Opening the Artist's Studio

JH    We discussed your preferred designation of AI art as promptography, a new form of intermedia (graphic scores or visual poetry). This brings me to your studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Additionally, you studied philosophy and German at the University of Cologne, Visual Arts at the Kunsthochschule Mainz, and Fine Art at the Sarojini Naidu School of Arts & Communication in Hyderabad, India. How have these studies influenced your artistic strategies and your understanding of art?

BE    In Prague, I was a guest student in the conceptual art class of Milan Knížák and the intermedia studies class of Miloš Šejn. Both helped me dissolve art genres. Whereas Šejn was a gentle thinker, Knížák loved to be the tyrant who insults his students, so that the stronger ones act out of defiance—while the weaker ones imploded. I learned a lot about how not to teach in his class.

In Germany, my professor was the Czech emigrant Vladimír Špaček, a photographer and art historian. From him, I learned a great appreciation of Czech photography, which is also a reason most people would not place my photographic work as “German”. What he also taught me was to question any art practice by asking: “Why is it like this? What is the deeper reason?”

India was a wild experience. It was like another planet in the '90s. It took me 25 years to realise that my photographic aesthetic of the poems series corresponds to an Indian night: lots of black and a few intense bright colours.

JH    How would you, as an artist, describe the medium you work with, and your work in general? What is the main theme or message you are trying to convey through your practice? 

BE My art is not about answers—it’s about unsettling questions. My medium is doubt. I am a researcher of the unconscious—not just the human psyche, but the machine’s latent space, that statistical purgatory where it tries to understand our collective visual debris. But to call myself an “AI artist” would be a trap. I am an artist working with AI, yes, but only to mirror its contradictions back to the viewer. My role is to show what AI really is: “Hauntology”.

Derrida coined the term to describe how the present is haunted by lost futures, but I see it as the aesthetic of algorithmic nostalgia. AI-generated art is drenched in hauntology. It’s a graveyard of styles, a regurgitation of cultural fragments stripped of their context. The machine doesn’t innovate; it séances. Every “original” output is a collage of dead artists’ labour, extinct moments, and abandoned futures. The machine can’t imagine tomorrow—it’s trapped in yesterday’s data, dressing up corpses in digital glitter. That’s hauntology: the eerie sense that we’re stuck in a loop, replaying the 20th century’s visual grammar like a broken record.

JH    In the era of widely discussed dopamine addiction to images circulating on social networks, one can envision future art as a convergence of hallucinatory AI-generated images with the drug-like effects of social media. Art may become a bodily, meditative or ecstatic, and transformative experience, where the sense of reality is replaced by “consensual hallucination” (Gibson). How do you envision the evolution of art in the age of AI?

BE    I see the evolution of art in the age of AI as a paradox: it is both a liberation and a challenge. We gain new tools for expression, but we also risk losing depth and meaning to an AI-generated statistical average. The task for artists—and for society—is to use these tools consciously, to create works that still speak to the human condition, that transform us not just on the surface, but in our bodies AND minds. In the future, art will, for sure, become more and more an experience. But will art replace "the sense of reality […] by 'consensual hallucination'"? No. Because social media has already done so. We call it filter bubbles. The task of art is to break open these bubbles and give impulses for new perceptions, thoughts and emotions. 

IMAGE CAPTIONS

1 | Boris Eldagsen, PSEUDO PORTRAIT, Jana Horáková x Boris Eldagsen, Mirror, promptografie, 2025, courtesy of the author
2 | Boris Eldagsen, PSEUDOMNESIA, The Electrician, promptografie, 2022, courtesy of Photo Edition Berlin
3 | Boris Eldagsen, BLIND SEARCHING FOR A MIRROR, Me Me Me, promptografie, 2024, courtesy of the author
4 | Boris Eldagsen, INTROSPECTIONS, Purgatory Rave Pt.2, promptografie, 2024
5 | Boris Eldagsen, PSEUDOMNESIA IV, The Nanny, promptografie, 2023, courtesy of the author
6 | Boris Eldagsen, PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT, Exclusive Access, promptografie, 2024, courtesy of the author
7 | Boris Eldagsen & Tanvir Taolad, TRAUMA PORN Pt.2 | Ants, promptografie, 2023, courtesy of the author