Latent Intersection

Full description

Research Background

In media arts, AI's latent space remains a subject of artistic curiosity for its opaqueness and emergent forces. Such emergence often results in AI hallucinations, unintended, strange visuals and textures in image generative AI. Hallucinations can induce uncanniness, echoing Freud's perception of the Unheimlich as a return of the familiar in defamiliarized form that teeters between the known and unknown (Bartnæs 2010). Drawing on Derrida's différance (Derrida 1997), the project asks how AI's strangeness can become a human/AI/audience communicative and interpretive opportunity, bridging the gap into its "black box".

Research Contribution

Latent Intersection is an extension of the Emergent Play project, which explores generative AI as an active co-player and co-creator. As lead artist/designer working with Agnieszka Kiejziewicz, Ricardo Arce and Kok Yoong Lim, I developed twelve generative AI lenticular prints of a shifting landscape that is both familiar and uncanny, mounted on both sides of six 85 × 85 cm frames hung on a curving path that refers to the latent space walk technique. Viewers become "latent space walkers", an extension of the embodied abstraction of AI space, as they move through the sequence and make sense of the evolving landscape. The work reconsiders AI hallucinations not as mere errors, but as novel medium-specific expressions.

Research Significance

Informed by Philip Galanter's Complexism (2016), sense-making here is a negotiated process among the triad of human/AI/viewer, exploring the shifting mode of seeing and spectatorship. An outcome of Emergent Play, funded by RMIT Vietnam's 2025 School Research Seed Funding, the work was exhibited at the curated 4th International INVENTX Creative Exhibition 2026 in Malaysia, where 114 artworks were selected from 153 submissions through peer review. It received a Silver Award from the final jury and was later selected for the AI-CREM 2026 symposium.