Theoretical Foundations of Phantom Mirror: Precarity, Violence, Representation, Longing, Identity, and the AI Mirror
1. Introduction: Toward a Theoretical Ecology of Dementia, Memory, and the Posthuman Image
The project Phantom Mirror occupies an epistemic terrain in which phenomenology, psychoanalysis, photography theory, political philosophy, and posthumanism converge. The lived experience of dementia — understood not solely as neurological deterioration but as a destabilisation of worldhood — demands a theoretical framework capable of addressing fragmentation at ontological, relational, representational, and symbolic levels. The literature surveyed below does not constitute a linear genealogy but a constellation of thinkers whose work illuminates distinct facets of this condition.
A single theory cannot fully articulate dementia’s simultaneity of perceptual dissolution, relational rupture, ethical precarity, mnemonic breakdown, symbolic violence, and representational impossibility. Thus, the review constructs a theoretical ecology comprising six primary interlocutors — Butler, Arendt, Bourdieu, Groys, Stewart, and Sontag — supported by psychoanalytic and phenomenological foundations (Freud, Lacan, Klein, Winnicott, Merleau-Ponty), alongside posthumanist interventions (Hayles, Baudrillard, Borges). Their combined insights furnish a framework for analysing Phantom Mirror as a practice that produces AI-generated representations of interior states, situating the work at the convergence of computational aesthetics and the ethics of vulnerability.
2. Precarity, Grievability, and the Ethics of Representation
Judith Butler – Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004)
Butler’s theoretical articulation of precarity is foundational for understanding dementia as a condition not merely of cognitive deterioration but of ontological vulnerability. Butler writes:
“To be a subject is to be exposed to others, to be vulnerable to loss, and to require recognition from a sustaining world.” (p. 22)
Dementia enacts the reversal of this sustaining world. The subject who once inhabited a stable symbolic environment becomes precarious through the collapse of recognisability. Butler famously asks:
“Whose lives are considered real? Whose deaths are considered grievable?” (p. 34)
Applied to dementia, this becomes: Whose subjectivity remains recognisable when cognitive coherence fails? And further: What forms of representation are ethically permissible when the subject cannot consent, cannot verify, and cannot narrate her own world?
This is precisely the ethical terrain of Phantom Mirror. The project responds to Butler’s framework by producing metaphoric, non-indexical visualisations of Lolly’s interior states, thereby refusing representational exploitation. Rather than photographing her suffering body — an act Sontag would critique — the images externalise emotional and perceptual states without violating personhood.
Butler’s insistence on the politics of mourning offers further resonance. Dementia induces what Butler terms “unacknowledged modes of grief” (p. 38): grief for someone physically present yet symbolically absent; grief for relational positions collapsing in real time. Phantom Mirror emerges as a practice of counter-mourning, insisting upon the grievability of a life dissolving under cognitive pressure.
Thus, Butler anchors the ethical legitimacy of the methodology: AI phototherapy is not a technological convenience, but a necessary ethical alternative for representing a precarious subject without reducing her to spectacle.
3. Violence and the Shattering of Worldhood
Hannah Arendt – On Violence (1970)
Arendt’s writing on violence concerns not physical harm but the rupture of meaning, the breakdown of shared reality, and the destruction of the symbolic order that grounds human action. She notes:
“Violence appears where power is in jeopardy.” (p. 56)
In dementia, the “power” in jeopardy is ontological — the power to inhabit a coherent world. Dementia enacts what Arendt describes as a “shattering of the human artifice” (p. 45): the destruction of the common world that binds subjects together.
For Lolly, the home becomes estranged. For William, the shared relational world collapses when his wife no longer recognises him. This phenomenon mirrors the concept of dual unreality developed in Fairy Note 4: two subjects sharing a physical environment yet inhabiting incompatible perceptual worlds.
Arendt thus provides the philosophical vocabulary to conceptualise dementia as a form of symbolic violence — not enacted by an aggressor, but by the breakdown of structures that sustain the appearance of reality. Phantom Mirror, with its impossible architectures and recursive interiors, visually enacts this Arendtian collapse.
AI’s hallucinations, ironically, become formally analogous to perceptual hallucinations produced by neurodegenerative disorder. Thus, the use of AI is not incidental but structurally appropriate, enabling visualisation of cognitive violence through aesthetic form.
4. Photography, the Family Archive, and the Ruin of Domestic Memory
Pierre Bourdieu – Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (1965)
Bourdieu frames photography as a bourgeois ritual, an instrument for maintaining social continuity, familial identity, and collective memory. He argues:
“The photographic act is an aspect of family life: it fulfils a social function of recording and solemnising the family’s integration in time.” (p. 19)
Dementia destabilises precisely this function. The family album, once a repository of shared recognition, becomes unreadable. Names detach from faces; time loses its anchor; the photographic archive becomes a site of confusion rather than continuity.
Phantom Mirror responds to this rupture by producing a new kind of family archive — one that does not depend on recognition but symbolises emotional truth. The AI phototherapy images operate as affective documents, phenomenological reconstructions, alternative souvenirs (in Stewart’s sense), and replacements for the broken family record.
This positions the work not outside photographic history but as an evolution of its domestic function in conditions of cognitive collapse.
5. Identity, Self-Documentation, and the Art-Subject
Boris Groys – Becoming an Artwork (2009)
Groys contends that in the digital era:
“The subject becomes an artist because the self becomes an artwork.” (p. 25)
His thesis is essential for understanding Phantom Mirror, where the psyche becomes the dataset and AI becomes the mirror through which the self is continuously remade. Groys notes:
“Documenting oneself has become the dominant practice of contemporary art.” (p. 32)
Yet the self documented here is not the stable autobiographical subject of earlier art practices. It is fragmented, relational, traumatised, posthuman, and distributed across dialogue with a machine.
The Alien/Familiar model mirrors Groys’ claim that the contemporary subject oscillates between estrangement and self-recognition, producing art from within this oscillation. Phantom Mirror is not simply a set of images but a process of self-constitution within the computational mirror.
6. Longing, Miniature Worlds, and the Poetics of Memory
Susan Stewart – On Longing (1984)
Stewart’s work is indispensable for understanding the phenomenology of loss. She argues:
“Longing is the desire for something that cannot be returned to — the past, the lost, the imagined.” (p. 23)
Dementia generates this condition acutely: a longing for a home that cannot be re-entered because neither the home nor the subject remains the same.
Stewart’s analyses of the miniature (the snow globe) and the gigantic (the overwhelming) are directly applicable to your imagery. She writes:
“The miniature stands for interiority, while the gigantic stands for the incommensurable.” (p. 69)
Your snow globe images represent Lolly’s fragmented interiority; your hourglass images represent the incommensurable scale of time slipping away. Stewart thus supplies the poetic-philosophical grounding for your symbolic repertoire.
7. The Ethics of Witnessing Suffering
Susan Sontag – Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)
Sontag argues that the representation of suffering carries an inherent ethical risk:
“There is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror.” (p. 42)
Her caution directly informs your decision not to photograph Lolly. Sontag writes:
“To photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.” (p. 46)
To photograph a person with dementia is to reduce their subjectivity to a spectacle. By refusing indexical capture and choosing metaphor, you enact the ethical alternative Sontag seeks:
“Images cannot be trusted to tell the truth of suffering, only its surface.” (p. 67)
AI allows you to visualise internal states rather than surfaces — evolving Sontag’s ethics rather than violating them.