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My series The Book of Hours explores how generative AI exposes human desires while reinforcing the power structures of dominant tech corporations, using Christian mysticism as an interpretive framework. Users of generative AI repeatedly input requests throughout the day, seeking answers, companionship, or the projection of private fantasies. As scholar Bernard McGinn notes, mystics devote their lives to cultivating a connection with divine power. Like religious devotees petitioning divine figures, users of generative AI tap into a synthetic divinity, unaware of or unconcerned by its connection to broader systems of power which control access to such a practice. Assuming the institutional role once held by the Church in Renaissance Europe, tech giants like Meta, Google, and Microsoft consolidate power and wealth through user participation.
Works from The Books of Hours incorporate appropriated AI imagery and digital textures such as sub-pixel grids and algorithmic noise to produce compositions of visual density. The series draws from livres d’heures, altarpieces, mosaics, stained glass, and illuminated manuscripts alongside the halftone visual language of mid-century American advertising. Motifs like starbursts function simultaneously as symbols of divine illumination and marketing spectacle.
Creative Commons Licensed Images
While the printing process introduces my human hand and intuition, I primarily make use of existing imagery in the digital collages that serve as a starting point for my prints. Because of the nature of my source imagery – appropriated generative AI images and images from open source archives – I’ve decided to make the digital collages available to other artists under a Creative Commons SA (share alike) license. The digital images below are available for you to use and remix, as long as you also share the final work under a Creative Commons SA license.
Kathryn Combs 