ABSTRACT
This chapter aims at exploring some of the ways in which AI-generated images may manifest what could be described as postdigital aesthetics. To this end, the chapter begins with a brief explication of the terms “postdigital,” “aesthetics,” and “postdigital aesthetics.” Further zooming in on medial representations that foreground their own mediality, materiality, and aesthetic form as opposed to their representational content and thus follow a logic of hypermediacy more strongly than a logic of immediacy, the chapter then turns toward diffusion-based AI image generators such as DALL·E, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion, all of which can be prompted to create AI-generated images that not only represent a more or less specific representational content but also exhibit a more or less specific aesthetic form. Against this background, the chapter analyzes different instantiations of the aesthetic transfer from the nondigital to the digital and the aesthetic intensification of the digital (as the two domains of postdigital aesthetics that are particularly relevant here) in a small corpus of AI-generated images of galloping horses that were created using ChatGPT 4o, and which arguably allow us to at least “catch a glimpse” of the postdigital aesthetics that DALL·E affords its users more or less “by default.”
