“The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk”

-George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - Philosophy of Right

In the image lies a sense of recourse. An idea that the entanglements of language and aesthetics can be reduced and flattened into the digestible. The image produces in itself a binary of reality and the unreal in addition to the third position: the Bent.

The Bent image abstracts reality, it’s leverage comes in the form of the mystic unknown. The manipulator as producer, free to construct a world of being in juxtaposition with the real. The play between the true and the imaginary offers inherently, in itself, a vision of the divine.

Full throated embrace of artificial intelligence and it’s capabilities as image interventionist are often either criticized (Accelerationist, anti-human, techno-capitalist, fascist etc.) or praised (Revolutionary, progressive -→ [(in that progress is understood as some sort of linear narrative arc of human as sole conspirator of lifecycle growth)]. However the proliferation of such technology has only served to flatten the discursive element inherently present in the image. It has reduced cognitive capability as it relates to comprehension into a series of key words, phrases and fleeting statements. The mystic ability of the computer to engage directly with user and subsequently Bend reality to their whim offers the illusion of the new and abstract while the reality, in both a technological and spiritual sense, points towards a regurgitation of the known and if anything, a proliferation of the false.

If the argument is in favor of false images, the ability to float pictures of politicians being arrested or deepfakes of celebrities, then this may be the golden age. If the idea is that in the cultural churn of the past half-decade, that we need to pile more hay onto the stack in which we search for the needle, this is Valhalla.

Proponents (temporarily suspending belief that it is not intentional) take up a side that ignores a power structure (strengthening its grip by the hour) increasingly building itself upon a foundation of abstract, the hesitant, confused and absurd. The information vortex through which our social contract has been slowly redefined over the past half century has now been set to overdrive.