“On Artifactual Imagination” – Keith Tilford at metaLAB

Join the Harvard metaLAB on Thursday, May 14 from 4–6pm for a special work-share & mingle with fantastic NYC artist Keith Tilford.

In this talk, Keith Tilford considers imagination in the context of generative AI as a lens through which to examine the evolutionary embedding of cognition in hybrid thinking systems more broadly. Drawing on evidence from art history, archaeological and cognitive-scientific research, and the anthropology of technology, he argues that the cognitive architecture of imagination is not merely expressed through artifacts and technical lineages, but is itself an artifact of technical practices and their cultural transmission — one coextensive with a reorganization of the imaginative function within a new technical apparatus.

A central claim is that, since early modern Europe, this distributed technical character has been progressively encrypted through a concept of imagination and its productive capacities that serves to insulate creativity and forms of liberal subjectivity from scrutiny and historical accountability. The contemporary antagonism toward generative AI, positioned as a radical threat to human creativity, is treated here as an ideological symptom that presupposes exactly this framing of subjectivity. Keith will also briefly present a current synthetic comics project using a trained LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation large language) model over Stable Diffusion XL that operationalizes and tests these claims.

Echo Chamber is pleased to bring Keith Tilford to metaLAB for a focused continuation of the conversations opened in Stockholm during the Comics & Machines conference at the Royal Institute of Technology and the University of Uppsala.