Latent-surrealism: Revisiting surrealism and its aesthetics in relation to contemporary AI-Generated cultural production

Abstract

This chapter examines AI-media objects - creative and artistic outputs generated through generative artificial intelligence in the form of text-to-X tools - in relation to three avant-garde movements of the twentieth century: Dadaism, Surrealism, and Conceptual Art. Drawing on Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass as an early precursor to these three movements and to anti-rationalist aesthetics, and on three case studies in AI-generated conceptual architecture - Matias del Campo's"Deep House"and Hassan Ragab's"Post-Pharaonic Architecture"and"A State of Decay"- the chapter develops the concept of latent-surrealism. Latent-surrealism includes a set of aesthetic and methodological conditions inherent to creative AI-media objects. These include the use of readymade datasets reassembled through collage-like processes, the absurd as an aesthetic quality of machine hallucinations, and the decoupling of craft from artistic value. The chapter further argues that AI-media objects represent a shift in the conditions of creative production: where earlier computational tools required graphical interfaces and programming literacy, natural language now functions as the operative medium. This repositions the prompt (as language-based instructions) in the center of the creative process, in continuity with the legacy of Conceptual Art, and signals a linguistic turn across creative fields that make (use of) AI-media objects.