AI-images and gaze violence according to Dietmar Kamper

Abstract

The German media theorist Dietmar Kamper conflated the approaches of Lacan and Leibniz, criticizing the simulacrum and violence of imagery. For him, digital simulation implies the exhaustion of imagination and of the assumption of the Other, so that reality will only be able to present itself and thereby compel ever new pictures of the world. But Kamper’s thought does not imply indistinguishability in the digital world: there are possible techniques of looking that cannot be depleted as ready-made imagery. With that in mind, we can refine the specific nature of images created by AI. The images are not so much combinations, but rather present a specific gaze technique within the communication that has already begun. If we understand the development of such images as a dialog, then the images will not only be appropriate, but also inspired.