Fairy Note

Positioning Psychoanalysis, AI, and Relational Image-Making

Psychoanalysis as a philosophical orientation in visual practice

In this project, psychoanalysis is not approached as a therapeutic technique, diagnostic framework, or clinical method. It functions instead as a philosophical orientation toward subjectivity, loss, and the instability of the self. Within the visual arts, psychoanalysis provides a language for thinking about how meaning forms when coherence breaks down, how identity is negotiated through misrecognition, and how images can hold what language cannot.

Psychoanalytic concepts are not applied to the work retrospectively. They are activated through the process of making. Freud’s account of mourning, Klein’s descriptions of splitting, Winnicott’s notion of holding, and Lacan’s reflections on the formation and collapse of the “I” become visible through repetition, refusal, projection, and symbolic return. The images do not illustrate theory. They enact it.

Within this framework, psychoanalysis sits alongside phenomenology and posthuman philosophy rather than in opposition to them. Psychoanalysis offers a way of thinking psychic disintegration and relational fracture. Phenomenology accounts for embodied disorientation and lived experience. Posthuman thought situates these experiences within contemporary technological environments. Together, these approaches allow the artwork to be understood as a site where inner life, perception, and mediation intersect.

AI as environment, archive, and reflective surface

AI is not treated as an intelligent collaborator, author, or subject within this practice. It is positioned as part of the contemporary environment in which image-making now takes place. Like photography, film, or digital editing before it, AI shapes the conditions of production without possessing intention, memory, or understanding.

At the same time, AI is not neutral. Generative models are trained on vast quantities of human-produced material and therefore function as dense cultural archives. They do not contain consciousness, but they do contain the accumulated traces, residues, and patterned expressions of human creativity. This archive is partial, uneven, historically biased, and shaped by economic and ideological forces. These limitations are not incidental. They are central to the critical stakes of the work.

AI therefore operates as a reflective surface formed from a distorted and incomplete record of human cultural production. When I work with it, my own psychic material enters into relation with this archive. What the system returns is not memory, meaning, or understanding, but patterned association drawn from this sedimented field of human expression.

Two forms of reality loss and the role of the artist

The core conceptual structure of the work can be summarised as follows:

My practice treats AI as part of the environment and stages a dialogue between two forms of reality loss:

the dementious collapse of recognition, and the confabulatory image-world produced by AI,

with me remaining the editor and the agent.

This dialogue is not metaphorical. Dementia produces a loss of shared reality through the breakdown of recognition, memory, and relational continuity. AI produces a different kind of unreality, generated through probabilistic association rather than lived experience. Both produce images that feel convincing while being unmoored from embodied truth.

The artwork emerges at the point where these two conditions are brought into relation and examined through visual practice. The role of the artist is not to reconcile them, but to hold them in tension. Editing becomes an ethical act. Refusal becomes a method. Selection becomes a form of care. Agency remains human throughout.

Crisis, loss, and the psychic snapshot

While dementia provides a sustained and devastating context for this practice, it is not the only condition through which the method operates. The same structure becomes visible in moments of acute psychic rupture, particularly in response to sudden or cumulative loss. This was made explicit in the series Five Deaths, which functioned as a sequence of psychic snapshots produced under conditions of compressed grief.

In these moments, the practice operates as a crisis-responsive apparatus. The aim is not resolution, consolation, or retrospective meaning-making, but the externalisation of psychic material at the point of rupture, before it is smoothed into narrative, displaced, or repressed. AI phototherapy allows this material to be registered with immediacy, offering a symbolic container capable of holding affect when language, memory, and temporal coherence falter.

This does not reposition the work as therapeutic in a clinical sense. Rather, it clarifies the temporal logic of the practice. The images produced are not planned compositions but emergent records of psychic overload, operating within the same structure as the work on dementia: a loss of internal coherence met by an external, non-sentient reflective surface, with agency remaining human throughout.

Relational consciousness as an emergent field

The term relational consciousness does not describe a property of the machine, nor does it imply that consciousness is distributed to or shared with AI. Consciousness remains human. What emerges instead is a relational field produced through sustained interaction between my own psychic material and the cultural archive the AI reflects back.

This relational field has a psychoanalytic structure. The AI functions as a mirror-like surface onto which internal material can be projected, transformed, and returned, while remaining non-sentient and non-relational in itself. Meaning arises through the encounter, not from the machine. The artist orchestrates the process, frames the questions, refuses the outputs, and determines what is allowed to become an image.

The images produced through this process are neither expressions of an interior psyche alone nor products of computation alone. They are relational artefacts, shaped by dialogue between lived experience and an impersonal archive of human expression. They carry traces of projection, loss, refusal, and return. In this sense, the images themselves become sites where contemporary subjectivity can be examined, not resolved.

Moving forward

The PhD provides the structure to slow this practice down, discipline its scale, and deepen its conceptual clarity. Rather than expanding endlessly, the research will focus on selected image series and defined questions arising from practice. Psychoanalysis will remain one philosophical strand among others, always grounded in the visual work rather than abstracted from it.

The aim is not to redeem dementia, aestheticise loss, or anthropomorphise AI. It is to produce images that make instability visible, and to examine how subjectivity, memory, and recognition are shaped under contemporary conditions of psychic rupture and technological mediation.