Something rich and strange: a psycho-geographic unconcealing of the genius loci of Shoreditch, London, exploring affinities between generative artificial intelligence and Shakespearean text

This arts-led research project investigates the creative potential of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in a visual art practice. To stimulate human/computer creative collaboration I introduce the imaging power of GenAI models to the words of William Shakespeare (1564 –1616). Text, themes, and lyrics written or performed in the years 1597-99 (when the poet was living and working in the London district of Shoreditch), are used as prompts in a ‘Creative Cybernetic’, psycho-geographic process of procedural interaction. This collaboration between creative entities: living, dead, organic and computational, aims to reveal something of the genius loci – the persistent Character of Place – that impacts the emotions and behaviours of individuals who pass through it over time (Ackroyd, 2001, Debord 1955). I will introduce a novel artistic form I term ‘desrêves’ (of dreams) – a re-imagining of the Situationist dérive (to drift or divert) in which GenAI drifts through its own latent space, much as a dreamer moves through the fluid topographies of sleep. Rather than marching toward predetermined outcomes, desrêves privileges wandering, surprise, and the unbidden collision of ideas. It does so through the corridors and libraries of the ‘imagesphere’: the digital cloud of visual data that envelops and pervades our modern, digitised world.

The research poses questions of authenticity, authorship, and how creative agency can be attributed (Boden 2009, Kalpokiene & Kalpokas, 2023). It proposes a collaborative role for artists as creative agents in a posthuman ‘cyborgian’ world (Haraway 1985) and examines the role of artistic practice in ‘bringing-forth out of concealment’ the underlying truths concerning the world-as-is that are revealed when technology is used not to satisfy a ‘will-to-mastery’ but as ‘a mode of revealing’ through creative industry (Heidegger 1954).