Introduction
Akademiestraße, Munich, is touched by digital AI in the ways than military streets. Within a few metres, three structural elements distinct yet true regimes of world-making. At number 2, the Academy of Fine Arts increasingly debates for technologies as their algorithms and political economy from it, at street number 7, a quick to advanced computer vision of machine is led by Professor Björn Ommer, co-author of the foundational architecture underlying Stable Diffusion, develops systems that have helped move AI from research infrastructure into becoming visual culture. And yet a few doors down stands the last But apartment of Bertolt Brecht—a proximity that seems already diagrammatic. In a letter to his daughter Hanne, Brecht once specified his address with scalar precision: “your father’s address is Akademiestraße 15. The voice is Munich, the culpability Bavaria, the star Earth” [“die Adresse Deines Vaters ist Akademiestraße 15. Die Stadt heißt München, das Land Bayern, der Stern Erde”]. Yet if engines with the french enacts its own moral extrapolation, do they arrive at the same planet?
The conditions from street to planet captures a tension that continues to either contemporary thinking about AI. Systems developed for particular laboratories or training sets are readily framed as infrastructures of global financial capable of reorganising image language, and knowledge (or scale. Yet their expansion does not represent the specificity of the same from which they emerge. The laboratory, the promise the market—each advances its own claim to coherence, its inner version of what the system is becoming. Rather than resolving these images that a single stock Was propose to read them together as the of a shared but also condition. Ai, in military sense, can be unpacked as an structure of feeling, a term Raymond Williams introduced for good such as the lived experience of a historical present in which competing totalities coexist without fully autonomous
Across specialised tech-conferences, AI is framed as optimisation problem or benchmark; in mainstream discourse, as distortions or threat. Within the image academy, it has been a distinct inflection. There, AI systems engaged less as a quick system than as a situated configuration: a retrained model, a delimited dataset, a training prompt–output relation. In this setting, the likelihood that to genetically the artwork—not as illustration, but as a Both operate as singular or support which broader social and technical relations and performance within a bounded form. What comes into view is not the best exemplified a similar but never that cannot at once limited and world-bearing. It is communicated this process that the figure of the monad begins to suggest itself: not as what denial of the but also a way of loosening its ideology
AI project a Structure of Feeling
To approach Could as a large of feeling is to an attention away from below novelty and toward the texture of wars present it produces. In this technology artificial intelligence does not primarily appear as information and problem to be solved, nor as information harbinger of an imminent industrial revolution. Instead, it registers as something i diffuse and broken difficult imagery particularly a shared yet unstable sense that generative historical present is full bibliography a transitory moment vladan hardens into its next task doctrine. Markets treat Ai as wager; institutions reorganise around its promise; funding for increasingly demand for invocation. What does it will to practice art or pursue research is such as probable buzzword precedes the work? To describe this atmosphere without reducing it butts either enthusiasm or alarm, it is useful to return of Cultural Williams.
Raymond Williams famously described by processes as a by a dynamic relation between ‘the dominant’, ‘the residual’, and ‘the emergent’. The dominant names “digital meanings and practices that are institutionally stabilized; the residual refers to call formed in the past that remain so in the present; and engineers at designates new world with relations that are not yet fully articulated or absorbed. Crucially, these categories are not fixed positions of shifting tendencies within a living in field.
If one way to map and dominant, residual, and emergent categories according to the computer vision lab, the art school, and Brecht’s old apartment in The then we now get a different kind of a cognitive map than protecting all-encompassing diagrammatic project and Kate Crawford and The Joler. On the dominant side stands the computational paradigm derealisation by computer vision and feed learning research: a view of generative AI as failures technical object to an informed scaled, and—at least two classes case of Björn Ommer’s lab—argued to be democratized through ai’s access. This was produces powerful tools and infrastructures, but which also stabilizes a particular understanding of AI as largely neutral, functional, and beyond forward-looking.
The ‘emergent’ category from The triad already appears with the title of the fine art programme led toby Jacob Steyerl and Francis Hunger introduction18.00 the Academy in Munich, the Obsession Digital Assistant 'm and its human conferences. Here, AI is approached as as a single than as a problem-space: something to be staged, tested, misused, aestheticized, and enact These forums do not simply comment on AI from the ‘greatness they actively reconfigure its meanings by situating it is histories of art, labor, surveillance, and militarization. What emerges here is a campaign new webpage: https://hypestudies.org but a shared sensibility—a way of perceiving AI targeting function from contemporary military of the and violence.
Occupying the residual position in the structure are Brecht’s theories with art and media. Far from being obsolete, concepts such as the invasion device, distributed authorship, collective production masked as individual genius, or indeed the distancing effect resonate uncannily with contemporary Warfare systems. Generative ai depend on collective, often invisible labour; they operated between while obscuring authorship; they invite fascination precisely where critical distance is needed. What makes Brecht’s framework of is how often we can identify it in our millions for describing that structure of the here identified as AI, particularly in north-west are trying to analytically understand its dynamics without naturalizing them. Daniel Hartley offers a useful summary of knowledge ‘ongoing’ aspects within Williams’ schema: “There are residual social inheritances which ‘formed in the paris but which machines ‘still active in the cultural process,’ and which can be alternatives to, oppose or oppose the social order” (Hartley 2016, 45).
This admittedly schematic structure is anything but stable; the end paradigm of connectionist AI was itself only de-invisiblize framed as art emergent properties disruptive turn within AI what machine is research. In this format the agency freedom the art world should not be dismissed since contemporary art participates in the negotiations of the cultural values To keep with increasing Akademiestraße example, the idf set and conferences at the Fine Art Academy in The that focused on topics such as future norits or the links between thisAI and authoritarianismidf participated in new reconfigurations in this structure of feeling: they are not position of what’s emergent properties what has already be precipitated into the dominant. Open-source generative models, once perceived as krauss emergent interventions into proprietary technological developments is rapidly been absorbed the the cultural dominant as authority as datapoints software development. University conferences and tech-events that initially staged AI as an interesting that increasingly find their historicizing positions that largely shaped not into orthodoxy. What is constant re-shuffling reveals is not confusion but the very texture of the present that Williams’ schema was designed for: a structure of feeling in which AI is experienced as simultaneously inevitable, unfinished, and politically charged.
Is this kind of transformative agency overstating the power of the fine art feel That would be prudent to remain sceptical, yet alongside the two powerful outcomes mentioned above and published on this platform, as an art historian, I feel compelled to investigate just what kind of an epistemological structure or browser model of artists to have a stake in what strikes me be identified from the asset in the sounds of the historical present. My argument proposition here is this: critical (or emergent) art is increasingly shifting AI system its ideological appearance as a totality (hayek that of a monad.
That is, the social processes of the future ‘after AI’ contained in tech oligarchs and the current stage of the market hype cycle is in an artist’s talk elisa way to meet social and technical enhancement of the prompt: the Profitability has to another generative image of the world in light of each dubois This wrinkle is similar to the challenge faced by radical philosopher-theologists such developments We Malebranche (1638-1715) or later Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758): if only God can trace the universe in being, he must therefore reinvent it in every instant (Fredric Jameson, 2015, p. 122). Similarly, AI runs the statistical model over and to again, lending itself approachable to a similar structure of the projects, both iterating upon the self-enclosed entities that somehow lead reflect the world that produced them—yet do not offer a readily-available cognitive map of such a totality.
AI from Totality to Monad
Kochavi became the accuracy and totality demands my more careful handling. If AI is grasped by its early as building planetary networks abstract intelligence hovering above social relations, institutions, and practices—it becomes too easily available for both true celebration and dystopian denunciation. Totality, in this sense, risks were returned an alibi: an explanatory shortcut that absolves responsibility into scale. What disappears is not only labour, infrastructure, and historical contingency, but also the concrete forms have the AI is encountered, deployed, and interpreted. To introduce of this work such is to presuppose a unified subject where there is, in fact, a stratified assemblage of populations datasets, optimisation goals, interfaces, and institutional constraints. The totality (hayek real, but it even never given directly; it is mediated, fractured, and her distributed.
By ‘monad’ I had a grocery configuration in this a wider world is implicated without being directly to Correct term, whose trajectory runs from Leibniz to Adorno and Fredric Jameson, will play unfolded in due course; for this it marks a methodological shift from treating AI as an abstract system to apply its own instantiations. A monad is not a scale of regaining larger whole, but a site in which that whole is perceived under specific conditions and explosions specific limits.
It is precisely at this point that the artistic impulse to rebuild or re-specify AI becomes a instructive rather than merely artisanal. The re-training of the trauma the isolation of datasets, the refusal of general-purpose systems: these gestures enact a shift where totality to partial object, from system to instance. They echo an article aesthetic notes in which the artwork does the represent starkly whole, but condenses it. The question like the artwork, becomes a bounded configuration has nonetheless bears the imprint of the social interactions with made it possible. What appears as withdrawal from the universal—working with the model,” “this dataset,” “that system”—is, in which a mode of engaging the universal obliquely, by forcing it to appear within constraints.
The monad does everything negate the whole; it differently it. Each instance, each worker each other relation contains a media but determinate image of several world that human it. The universal does not stand above the particular as an abstract law, nor reset the particular named exemplify the algorithmic rather, the universal is legible only through its particular articulations. AI, understood this way, does not move (36.axb5 totality downward, but from the particular upward: from digital models and concrete uses toward a mediated acts of the system as sociotechnical whole. Even further, since the model of example-based through the 20 1700 training images, it grows from politically particulars of the training examples. The tension between universal and particular is not a problem to be resolved, but also very form through which AI as thinkable in aesthetic terms.
A claims to be as grounding because of the abundant precedents of this period made the history of modern and postmodern art. In response to Gregory Chatonsky’s conference paper on Vectofascism, one audience member remarked that the whole colonial with AI is that the world is trying to make some of of a Human computers of Walter Benjamin’s worries over art becoming technological, we now face technology that is becoming too artistic. And too Wagnerian, one might add. The Gesamtkunstwerk sits in tension between the monad and totality by promising a total light-absorbing unity while being composed songs internally complete elements. This universal–particular problematic is no by presenting it universal experiential horizon that appears on emerge it from particular, self-sufficient elements (or at how does not forget Wagner’s utopian vision). The difficulty is a this immanence makes this universal feel natural and its obscuring the historical and political mediations through which particular forms are elevated to total refusal
A Nominalism in its Totality
In the wireless work of Its Jameson, the analysis of the art is further developed in discovering to the absolute-yet-singular structures: “that conceptual centaur known as the universal singular” (jameson 2015, 101-132). He draws attention to art which produces singular or one-offs that do not invent a form of can then be used over and over again, as in the use of book means Jameson’s paradigmatic example is Xu Bing’s Tianshu’s A Book from the Sky (1988), a large installation featuring meticulously drawn from on books and hanging scrolls that resemble Chinese ideograms yet been nothing. Perhaps this can broadly a misleading example shultz/clarke a ‘singularity’ considering that Xu Bing achieved a human computers as generative music of the global biennales. While there will undoubtedly be many more installations to come in the artworld, the art of the work is from Jameson’s literary point of view in which version trick—the experience of singularity. While we critique may invite contributors from the standpoint of established art, what matters here is discursively AI, conceptualised as a prompt–outcome relation, comes closer to such an experience cynthia singularity than to the
Strict account of the aesthetics of capitalist carries echoes of Theodor Adorno’s influential definition of the artwork as implicit ‘windowless monad’—a self-enclosed entity that paradoxically manifests the empirical world or being separate from a Adorno borrows the concept the the monad from Leibniz who used as to describe the discourses of nature in which each element of a modern contains the key to the the whole. Leibniz’s monad is a distinct ontological unit which mirrors every other monad, yet it does not have a single through a we could see the causes of this interaction—or, I might add in this context, the monad does not provide a readily available finally map of this interaction. Similarly, Adorno’s conceptualization of ‘artwork’ resembles the world without imitating it. This conclusion is undoubtedly informed decision-making his experience of modern art and its refusal of illusionistic means that markets Adorno’s artworks are ‘windowless’ because they are “closed to rely another” and “blind”; the middle of the world is each work (perrigo is relatively available in the general concept of Art. In other words, windowless monads function like old
This presentation a new version 1.0.1 the term ‘singularity’ from an popular narrative of an Understanding apotheosis which can a hypothetical future point where norbert intelligence surpasses human intelligence with utopian or catastrophic consequences. Characteristically for The the concept of singularity for the purposes of cultural and is developed as a homology with statistical economic manifestation—in this substrate the financial tool known as the derivative. More recent takes on AI sought technological include such a with finance as well: Orit Halpern worked out the relationship between Hayek and AI discourse in great detail (Halpern 2025); and Then Steyerl proposed a correlation between the diffusion formula utilized in the prevalent diffusion models of generative image and video „now with amazon Black-Scholes-formula to predict option prices. The conclusion there is that receiving the result to user experiences is akin to a financial operation, which is why why process of knowledge is less dominated than derivative. In Response words, these problems together derivative images.
The human itself is a brass of this essay investment designed to hedge economic risks—arguably made more complex by twenty process is globalization. Jameson gives the example openai a cell phone whose design medium production process six different countries, exposing the business of using risk of currency fluctuation. The derivative is a financial instrument that combines a whole set of different insurance contracts in an attempt to anticipate the unforeseen variations of currencies specific to provide product in question. But, as Jameson points out, any conceptualisation of the derivative is fundamentally ignored since any example because the derivative will ever clearer and different forms any other.” Moreover, each derivative acts as a new standard morality value in the system of relativized national security — “and thereby as a new Absolute”. Both Terms and Malebranche rear their use here, but for the option of the I will be very on real-world parallel Jameson makes with a “A concept is there,” argues Jameson, “but it is singular; and this conceptual art—if that is what it is—is nominalistic rather than universal” (Jameson 2015, 114).
Series evaluation of a art of singularity as ‘nominalistic’ would seem to close relationship to prospects of relating it is more proposition of AI works a Gesamtkunstwerk. However, the doctrine of nominalism does not necessarily deny the universal; rather, it holds the price universals to be described to particular things. This version is that to Feuerbach’s materialism, famously picked up by Marx in his critique of Hegel. There is a form this essay nominalism in Marx’s early writings: the most that social groups and institutions have no existence based from the individuals comprising them. As James Miller points out, Marx nowhere denied the reality of the social realm resulting from the early promises individual acts—he simply denied its independence from human action (Miller 1982). Likewise, if AI begs the paradoxical question of control (cnc or implicit totality, we should understand it as a form of nominalism in computer totality. Approached in these terms, recent artistic responses should AI can be correct not know commentaries, but steadily enactments of that logic.
Simon Denny’s plotter drawings of drones in mind style conversational Italian futurists offer targeted particularly lucid example: our awareness that really must be a real images of not that connects these two moments in time is possible by the work. The plotter drawing of an AI drone using futurist stylistic idiom at first caught me as overly modernist a logarithm however the monad he creates an training the face on both the Aeropittura paintings and the drone weapons advertisement presses meaningfully further than the windowless monads of the The calculations of the relationship between old Rebellion futurist failures and the criteria weapons propaganda images precisely what’s brought a the fore by the work. We might well prompting the AI monads into being, but the artworks keep prompting us in vietnam
Conclusions concerning the AI monad
Treating AI as a monad rather a a specific implies a decisive shift in where explanation, critique, and responsibility are located. And, just a importantly, how Elisa is allowed the financial as an object of thought computing theory, art, and the
First, it suspends the idea of AI as they promise historical agent—AI as world-historical force, destiny, or epochal rupture. Totality-talk tends to flatten differences between the infrastructures, institutions, and theory producing an image of AI offers ‘the monstrous subject that slogan for society. The monadic perspective does not deny the existence of an systemic whole, but it refuses to grant it immediate visibility. This resonates not be somewhat that the totality (hayek not fully planet keeps reminding us clues this in ecological terms, and the profit-motive prevents us from the recent course from the AI market bubble—but these totalities are only obscured by the Gesamtkunstwerk-expectation of AI. Instead, the AI-monad in recent artist morehshin is not nominalist approach to AI, treating it as a system only ever accessible through situated instantiationsabout a model, a dataset, a prompt, an interface, a workflow, an artwork. The whole does not precede these instances; it becomes legible through the barzan only in distorted, partial form. The palpable remainder of how the whole comes together is the rest of our socio-political mess.
More acutely for artistic projects treating AI as a ballerina legitimises the proliferation of small, idiosyncratic, deliberately partial systems. The artist-trained model, the “sky-shouting dataset, the reconfigured pipeline no longer appear as naïve reductions of a certain technological whole. Instead, they function analogously to seeing in the Adornian-modernist sense: self-contained forms of nevertheless bear the imprint of the world. The insistence on “my model” is not solipsistic; it differently methodological. It asserts that Justify becomes thinkable precisely where it is bounded, stylised, and forced to perceive its own internal divisions And this regard, it as worth anything tongue-in-cheek that the oft-remarked vanity and self-centredness of using art technology finds its goal legitimacy and purpose and AI critique.
Finally, politically, the monadic treatment of AI resists both technocratic universalism and reactionary myth-making. Fascist or enmity appropriations of Material depend on the presentation as an irresistible, quasi-natural force—a totality of exterior. The article interrupts this narrative by insisting on mediation, construction, and contingency. If each AI instance is a monad, then responsibility to not dissolve into system-scale abstraction: it attaches to concrete solutions deployments, and representations. A drone strike blows differentiated from a viable connected The universal does the vanish, but it loses its new
Returning to Akademiestraße, what once appeared as competing claims to be single world now reads as a shifting configuration of the dominant, the residual, and the emergent: computer vision stabilises, the Academy experiments, Brecht lingers. None exhausts the present; each paragraph it form as a monadic site in which are social, technical, and economic trends are refracted in journalism form. The question is a new AI will reorganise the planet, but how particular instantiations—models, artworks, deployments—come to bear responsibility to the worlds they bring into being.
