A strange surreal mundanity

It’s difficult to define exactly what emotion it created in me, but it felt like a strange surreal mundanity, and somehow made me laugh while also letting me puzzled by its mere existence. It felt like an image I didn’t know it needed to exist until I saw it. To me this picture represents a moment in which generative AI platforms exploded and managed to create photorealistic images through simple text prompts, accessible to everyone. I was never interested too much in the truth discourse of photography, and the crisis of manipulation that keeps accompanying digital imaging systems. The pope image was more interesting to me from the point of view of creating a space of possibility, visualizing an alternative version of the world that doesn’t exist but could. I think this space of imagination is very powerful, and even empowering for artists and creatives who can forge new narratives and re-appropriate media. I remember a GQ article saying that “the pope Francis puffer photo was real in our hearts”, which encapsulate the emotional side of AI I see in the picture. The image was created by 31-year-old man named Pablo Xavier using Midjourney, while he was tripping on shrooms. For some reason this also struck me as some mystical techno-shamanic ritual of image generation of sorts: a new religious icon emerging from the hallucinating prompts of a man high on mushrooms working with the equally mysterious and seemingly magic inner processes of machine learning algorithms.

What I love is the mundanity of the picture. The slight shift in the image of the pope’s attire and papal fashion. It’s not a strong and shocking picture of him in a controversial situation, and it’s not the AI slop aesthetic that have flooded the internet. I think the subtle qualities of affect are the most powerful ones: when the emotions in the image remain ambiguous and unnamed. They attract the gaze and move feelings in ways that we can’t properly articulate with words. And these affective responses are becoming increasingly part of the algorithmic images that are being created and disseminated. We can think of all these recent phenomena and image genres like reaction videos, doomscrolling, binge watching, thirst traps and sludge content. Images are not only increasingly created to trigger emotions, but they are part of economic and political systems that rely on them. Contemporary digital images depend on affective responses to create monetary value in the attention economy, but also to manipulate feelings in political context. I’m writing just a few weeks after the circulation of “Trump Gaza”’s AI video and the post on X by the official account of the White House offering a disturbing “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight 🔊” video.