For Supervisors and Examiners

(Fairy Notes 1, 2, 3 + Methodology Statements A, B, C)

A. Reader’s Guide for Supervisors

A concise overview of the three Fairy Notes for rapid academic assessment

This guide summarises the purpose, structure, and scholarly contribution of the three Fairy Notes developed as part of Eliza Stephens’ practice-led research. It provides a clear point of entry for assessors who may not have the time to read the full documents in detail.

1. Fairy Note 1: Embodied Perception, Neural Dissolution, and AI as Non-Embodied Reflective Medium

Purpose

To establish the philosophical foundation of the Phantom Mirror project by drawing on the distinction between embodied human perception and non-embodied AI pattern generation.

Core Argument

  • Human perception is embodied, enactive, and situated (Merleau-Ponty 1945).
  • Dementia disrupts embodied orientation, producing “neural dissolution”.
  • The carer undergoes secondary dissolution through relational rupture.
  • AI does not perceive but predicts; its non-embodiment allows it to externalise the artist’s inner affect.
  • The images are psychic snapshots, not instances of machine creativity.
  • This supports a phenomenology of caregiving, grief, and the unreality of dementia.

Contribution

Positions Phantom Mirror within phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy of AI. Establishes the asymmetry between embodied consciousness and AI’s non-embodied reflective surface.

2. Fairy Note 2: Towards an Anthropology of AI Image-Systems

Purpose

To situate Phantom Mirror within the emerging field of the anthropology of AI, treating AI not as a tool but as a cultural, patterned archive.

Core Argument

  • AI models contain a “swamp of human experience” embedded in training data.
  • The artist’s embodied, intentional engagement activates specific constellations from this archive.
  • This constitutes a practice-led anthropology.
  • The images function as both fieldnotes and conceptual triggers.
  • Your practice mirrors early theory-building traditions: Freud’s case method, Klein’s play technique, Lévi-Strauss’ structural analysis.

Contribution

Provides an academic placement for your methodology within anthropology, visual culture, and AI studies. Formalises the idea of AI-augmented visual ethnography.

3. Fairy Note 3: Do We Still Need the Bookshop? AI, Embodied Scholarship, and the Future of Knowledge

Purpose

To explore the epistemological implications of using AI as a thinking partner, and to address concerns about legitimacy, hallucination, and the future of academic community.

Core Argument

  • The empty bookshop shelf symbolises a temporal lag in academic publishing.
  • AI acts as cognitive scaffold, conceptual accelerator, and interdisciplinary synthesiser.
  • Scholarship remains fundamentally human: embodied, intentional, relational.
  • The bookshop represents belonging, not merely information.
  • Proposes symbiotic epistemology: human embodiment plus AI patterning.

Contribution

Defends AI-augmented scholarship as legitimate, rigorous, and aligned with emerging epistemic paradigms.

B. Methodology Statement: AI-Augmented Scholarship

Introduction

This methodology clarifies how AI is used within the project and positions AI as a legitimate scholarly tool within practice-led visual research.

1. Practice-Led Research as Primary Mode

The project is fundamentally a practice-led inquiry, where visual production precedes and generates theoretical reflection. Images created through Phantom Mirror are experiential data, case studies, and phenomenological sites.

2. AI as Reflective and Analytic Scaffold

AI tools are used as:

  • dialogic partners
  • synthesis engines
  • conceptual accelerators
  • reflective mirrors
  • archive interrogators

AI is not used to replace academic reading or writing. It supports the researcher’s embodied, intentional thought.

3. Human Embodiment as Epistemic Anchor

Your embodied experience provides:

  • context
  • emotional truth
  • phenomenological grounding
  • interpretative authority
  • ethical judgment

This prevents AI hallucination from becoming epistemically destabilising.

4. Symbiotic Epistemology

The model combines:

  • human subjectivity, embodiment, meaning-making
  • AI’s pattern recognition, speed, associative potential

This is particularly suited to interdisciplinary, practice-led and rapidly evolving fields.

5. Academic Integrity and Verification

  • all references are verifiable
  • AI output is always interpreted and edited by the researcher
  • theory arises from the researcher’s contextual meaning-making
  • transparency regarding AI use is maintained throughout

6. Conclusion

AI augments, rather than replaces, scholarly processes. The methodology remains rigorous, reflective, and grounded in academic traditions.

C. Justification of AI Use (200 Words)

This project employs artificial intelligence as an analytic and reflective scaffold within a practice-led research methodology. AI is not used to replace academic labour or generate unexamined content, but to augment human thinking, accelerate interdisciplinary synthesis, and support the development of original theoretical insight. All AI-assisted writing is shaped, directed, verified, and critically interpreted by the researcher, whose embodied experience, intentionality, and phenomenological grounding remain the primary epistemic drivers of the study.

The research requires engagement with multiple disciplines including phenomenology, psychoanalysis, anthropology of AI, cognitive science, and visual culture. AI enables rapid cross-referencing across these domains, allowing conceptual connections to be tested and elaborated at a pace appropriate to a fast-moving field. This does not diminish scholarly rigour; instead, it increases transparency, since each conceptual claim is verified through traceable references and reflective commentary.

Crucially, the images produced in Phantom Mirror arise not from AI autonomy but from the researcher’s embodied, situated prompting, making AI a tool comparable to a camera, archive, or ethnographic fieldsite. Its role is facilitative, not generative.

Therefore, AI use in this project is methodologically appropriate, ethically transparent, academically defensible, and consistent with emerging standards in creative, practice-based research.

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