Phantom Mirror: AI Phototherapy, Recursive Image Cognition, and Technologically Mediated Phenomenological Narrowing

Expanded Master Research Development and Positioning Document

Eliza Stephens – Practice-Led PhD

Introduction

This document consolidates the current theoretical, phenomenological, methodological, and practice-led development of the Phantom Mirror PhD project. The project investigates how technologically mediated image systems participate in cognition, affective processing, and meaning formation under conditions where ordinary worldhood begins to destabilise.

Developed through lived experiences of caregiving, dementia, grief, recursive mourning, and sustained engagement with generative AI image systems, the project increasingly explores how recursive symbolic-image systems function as survival structures through which overwhelming phenomenological experience becomes processable.

The project now sits simultaneously within:

visual culture and image theory
psychoanalysis and mourning
phenomenology and embodied cognition
neuroscience and predictive processing
distributed cognition and extended mind theory
Creative AI discourse
and contemporary debates surrounding post-indexical image systems.

Opening Position

Phantom Mirror did not begin as a theoretical proposition. It emerged through necessity. The onset of dementia within the family and the increasing instability of recognition, orientation, and identity surrounding caregiving produced experiences that frequently exceeded ordinary linguistic articulation.

AI phototherapy emerged gradually through recursive attempts to process these encounters through image-making.

At its core, AI phototherapy is not a therapeutic intervention for the person with dementia. This distinction is ethically and conceptually crucial. The project does not claim to restore phenomenological grounding to the person with dementia, nor does it suggest that AI image systems repair cognitive decline.

Rather, AI phototherapy functions as a recursive symbolic processing system for the caregiver-researcher witnessing:

failed recognition
cognitive destabilisation
recursive mourning
and collapse of familiar worldhood.

The methodology increasingly operates as:

survival tactic
symbolic holding environment
recursive externalisation system
and technologically mediated cognitive scaffold.

Caregiving, Dementia, and Altered Worldhood

The caregiving experience now forms one of the central research conditions of the PhD itself. Sustained involvement in dementia care functions as embedded phenomenological fieldwork. The project increasingly suggests that dementia is not simply memory loss but altered worldhood.

The collapse repeatedly witnessed within dementia appears less like isolated cognitive failure and more like disruption of the structures through which the world itself appears coherent and inhabitable.

This aligns strongly with:

Merleau-Ponty’s embodied phenomenology
Heidegger’s worldhood
and Thomas Fuchs’ work on the lived body.

The destabilisation repeatedly witnessed through caregiving involves:

altered orientation
disrupted environmental familiarity
fragmented relational recognition
and collapse of existential coherence.

One of the most important concepts emerging through the project is existential homelessness.

The repeated search for “home” increasingly appears not simply geographical but phenomenological. “Home” survives only as affective-symbolic orientation residue rather than recoverable physical place.

Similarly, family members increasingly survive as unstable symbolic structures rather than coherent embodied presences.

This became especially visible through repeated attempts by the subject to locate her daughter Lydia. Even during physical encounters, recognition increasingly appeared unstable. The “Lydia” existing within memory no longer fully corresponded to the embodied person physically present before her.

The project increasingly suggests that:

recognition itself depends upon stable worldhood.

When worldhood destabilises, relational coherence destabilises alongside it.

The FaceTime Phenomenon and Technologically Mediated Phenomenological Narrowing

One of the most important phenomenological observations within the project emerged through FaceTime interactions with family members.

Embodied recognition increasingly fails during physical encounters with relatives. However, technologically mediated recognition through screen-based interaction remains partially possible.

The subject can still recognise her son through FaceTime in ways that no longer consistently occur during embodied in-person interaction.

This observation became profoundly significant because it suggested that technologically mediated systems may reduce phenomenological complexity sufficiently to permit symbolic recognition where embodied relational density has become overwhelming or unstable.

This led to the development of one of the project’s major emerging concepts:

technologically mediated phenomenological narrowing

This refers to the way technologically mediated systems:

reduce embodied complexity
flatten perceptual density
simplify environmental overload
narrow relational ambiguity
and compress phenomenological fields into more processable symbolic structures.

Importantly, the project does not claim that technologically mediated systems are “truer” or “better” than embodied reality. Rather, they may reduce phenomenological density sufficiently to permit symbolic-affective processing under conditions where ordinary worldhood has become unstable.

The concept increasingly appears central not only to dementia recognition but to the operation of AI phototherapy itself.

The generated image does not “solve” grief or cognitive collapse. Instead, it compresses overwhelming phenomenological complexity into recursively processable symbolic-affective form.

This may explain why AI-generated imagery becomes emotionally clarifying for the researcher. The image functions not as superior representation but as technologically narrowed symbolic structure through which overwhelming lived density becomes processable.

The Bedsheet Image and the Origins of AI Phototherapy

One of the earliest foundational moments within the project emerged through an apparently minor caregiving encounter involving bedsheets.

During one of the earliest recognisable moments of cognitive decline, the subject repeatedly brought the wrong bedsheets while attempting to make a bed, unable to remember which sheets corresponded to which room.

The emotional force of this encounter became overwhelming precisely because of its apparent simplicity. It marked one of the earliest moments where ordinary domestic orientation visibly collapsed.

Unable fully to process the encounter linguistically, the researcher generated an AI image depicting a confused woman standing on a bed surrounded by sheets in states of uncertainty and disorientation.

The resulting image became emotionally devastating and unexpectedly clarifying.

Retrospectively, this image now appears as one of the first manifestations of AI phototherapy itself.

The image did not explain the event.
It assembled it.

This distinction has become central to the methodology. The image transformed overwhelming phenomenological density into recursively processable symbolic-affective form.

The image now appears foundational because it already contains many of the structures later developed theoretically:

phenomenological destabilisation
recursive symbolic processing
image-thinking
technologically mediated phenomenological narrowing
affective arrest
and recursive image cognition.

AI Phototherapy, Five Deaths, and Psychic Snapshots

The methodology developed through Phantom Mirror is termed AI phototherapy. This process extends earlier feminist reenactment and phototherapy practices associated with Jo Spence and Rosy Martin into the context of generative AI systems.

However, AI phototherapy increasingly differs significantly from conventional AI image-making discourse.

The project does not primarily treat:

prompting as authorship
image generation as final production
or outputs as stable representational artefacts.

Instead, meaning increasingly appears to emerge through recursive iteration itself.

The methodology operates through the recursive structure:

experience → dialogue → prompt → image generation → refusal → variation → recognition → reflection

Images are repeatedly generated, rejected, varied, and re-entered into the process until one produces what is now being theorised as affective arrest: a moment of perceptual and emotional recognition that cannot initially be fully linguistically articulated.

The image therefore becomes:

not the outcome of thought
but the site where thought happens.

This recursive image process became especially visible during Five Deaths, a sequence produced during a short period of repeated bereavement in which multiple losses occurred before earlier grief had become processable.

Within Five Deaths, image-generation increasingly functioned as a way of processing psychic disintegration in real time.

Images often appeared to register emotional states before they became fully linguistically available.

This led to the development of one of the project’s most important concepts:

psychic snapshots

Psychic snapshots are not representations of prior thought. They are fragments of cognition becoming visible during emergence.

The image captures:

instability
incompletion
affective formation
symbolic rupture
and recursive emotional processing in motion.

Importantly, the concept of psychic snapshots emerged prior to encountering Victor Burgin’s theorisation of psychical objects.

The later convergence with Burgin became significant because it suggested that structures already emerging operationally through practice were independently converging with contemporary image theory.

Victor Burgin, Psychical Objects, and the Chester Encounter

Victor Burgin’s writings have become increasingly central to the project, particularly following direct engagement with him through conferences and seminars in Chester where Burgin delivered the keynote lecture.

Burgin’s concept of the image as a psychical object strongly aligns with the operation of AI phototherapy, where images increasingly behave less like representations and more like symbolic-affective structures participating in cognition itself.

Importantly, the convergence between Burgin’s psychical objects and the project’s psychic snapshots occurred after the latter concept had already emerged through practice. This sequence matters academically because it demonstrates theory converging with structures already generated operationally through image-making rather than the project merely applying pre-existing theory retrospectively.

Burgin’s critique of “backstory art” has also become highly significant. The project increasingly insists that the images themselves possess affective and phenomenological force independently of explanatory framing.

The work cannot simply become theory attached to AI-generated imagery.

The images themselves must:

hold
interrupt
destabilise
and produce thought.

The Chester encounter became especially important because Burgin explicitly challenged the project theoretically. He questioned whether the psychoanalytic structures intuitively perceived within recursive AI image systems could be rigorously articulated philosophically and phenomenologically.

Responding to this challenge now forms one of the major trajectories for the next phase of the research.

Flusser, Mira Schendel, and the Reversal of Image-Thinking

One of the most important recent theoretical developments within the project has been the encounter with Joanna Zylinska and Yanai Toister’s Image Thinking after Artificial Intelligence, particularly their discussion of Vilém Flusser’s reflections on Mira Schendel.

Traditional Western epistemology largely operates through:

world → image → concept

Flusser proposes a reversal:

concept → image → assembled meaning/world

Images no longer simply represent pre-existing reality. They participate in assembling conceptual-affective structures into processable form.

Flusser writes:

“I am not supposed to explain it… I am meant to assemble it.”

This statement now appears extraordinarily close to the operation of AI phototherapy.

The recursive image process does not proceed through explanation or conceptual certainty. Instead it proceeds through:

recursive assembly
variation
refusal
symbolic accumulation
affective recognition
and image-based negotiation.

The meaning is not fully known before the image.

The image allows the meaning to emerge.

This strongly aligns with the lived operation of AI phototherapy:

the recursive image loop allows emotional states and phenomenological tensions to become visually processable before they become linguistically stable.

This reversal also helps explain why AI-generated images differ fundamentally from traditional photography.

The AI image is not primarily:

indexical
documentary
or world-capturing.

Rather:

prompts become operations
concepts become image-space
latent structures become visualised
and recursive image fields become cognitive environments.

Joanna Zylinska, Image-Thinking, and the Artist as Navigator

Joanna Zylinska’s concept of image-thinking has become one of the closest contemporary theoretical articulations of structures already emerging through practice.

Zylinska proposes that images increasingly function not simply as objects of interpretation but as agents within cognition itself.

Her concept of textimagetext describes recursive loops in which language generates images that subsequently feed back into linguistic and symbolic systems.

However, Phantom Mirror increasingly suggests that recursive image cognition may move beyond language-dominant loops toward image-dominant recursive systems.

Where conventional AI discourse often remains trapped within:

prompt → image

the methodology increasingly behaves as:

image → image → image → recognition.

Language increasingly functions as threshold or initiating structure, while recursive image variation becomes the primary cognitive field itself.

This has also led to another important conceptual shift:

the artist increasingly functions not as author but as navigator

The artist no longer simply produces stable representational artefacts. Instead:

recursive systems are navigated
symbolic emergence is negotiated
image fields are traversed
patterns are recognised
and meaning is temporarily stabilised through recursive movement.

Recursive Cognition, Neuroscience, and Sedimented Meaning

Recent developments in neuroscience and AI philosophy independently converge with structures already emerging operationally through the practice.

Nicole Rust argues against mechanistic models of cognition, proposing instead that mood and cognition emerge recursively through feedback systems rather than linear causal chains.

This strongly parallels the recursive loops of AI phototherapy:

emotion → dialogue → image → refusal → recognition → emotional reorganisation

The image is not a static endpoint. It feeds back recursively into:

memory
affect
perception
and symbolic restructuring.

Similarly, Harald Wiltsche and Ken Archer introduce the concept of sedimented meaning:

AI systems operate upon accumulated historical residues of human symbolic expression.

The AI system therefore increasingly functions not as autonomous consciousness but as:

reflective symbolic archive
recursive pattern synthesiser
technologically mediated sediment of human cognition.

Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Altered Worldhood

Phenomenology has become increasingly central to the project because the caregiving experience repeatedly reveals that cognition cannot be understood as isolated symbolic processing detached from embodiment and worldhood.

Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodied perception becomes especially important because the dementia experience repeatedly demonstrates that meaning is inseparable from embodied orientation.

The collapse repeatedly witnessed within dementia is not simply cognitive error. It is:

destabilised embodiment
altered spatial orientation
disrupted environmental familiarity
fractured relational coherence
and collapse of existential grounding.

Thomas Fuchs’ work on the lived body strongly reinforces this understanding.

The FaceTime phenomenon intensified this insight dramatically. The fact that technologically mediated screen-recognition remains partially processable after embodied recognition destabilises reveals how profoundly perception depends upon phenomenological organisation.

The project increasingly suggests that:

recognition
orientation
memory
and identity

are fundamentally relational and environmentally scaffolded phenomena rather than isolated internal computations.

Psychoanalysis Returns

Although the project increasingly engages neuroscience, phenomenology, and distributed cognition, psychoanalysis remains foundational.

Freud’s theories of mourning and melancholia strongly resonate with the recursive image loops of AI phototherapy.

Christopher Bollas’ concept of the “unthought known” remains especially important because many generated images appear to stabilise affective structures before they become fully symbolised linguistically.

Winnicott’s concept of holding space also remains central.

AI phototherapy increasingly functions as:

a technologically mediated holding environment
through which overwhelming experience becomes recursively processable.

Importantly, psychoanalysis no longer functions as total explanatory framework. Instead, it increasingly operates as one recursive layer within broader systems involving:

image-thinking
distributed cognition
phenomenology
recursive processing
and technologically mediated symbolic assembly.

The Art Itself

Although the project now engages heavily with neuroscience, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and Creative AI theory, it remains fundamentally a practice-led PhD in art.

The images themselves matter.

Exhibitions and public encounters repeatedly show viewers responding to the work as:

emotionally overwhelming
uncanny
destabilising
affectively charged
and difficult to fully explain.

The work’s force cannot be reducible to explanatory framing.

The images themselves must:

hold
interrupt
destabilise
and produce thought.

The visual encounter itself therefore functions as a primary research site.

Current Dissemination and Next 12 Months

The project is now entering active dialogue with the wider field through:

submission to V.A.R. (Visual Arts Research, University of Illinois Press)
Freud Museum abstract development
Unstable conference application with University of Brighton and Photoworks
Suffolk postgraduate symposium presentation
TEDx application
and continued dialogue with Victor Burgin.

The next twelve months will focus on:

ongoing caregiving and phenomenological observation
continued recursive image-making
deeper psychoanalytic research
refinement of AI phototherapy methodology
consolidation of fairy notes
engagement with Flusser, Burgin, Zylinska, Fuchs, and distributed cognition theory
and further development of technologically mediated phenomenological narrowing as a major theoretical concept.

Final Position

Phantom Mirror increasingly appears not as an “AI art project about dementia” but as a practice-led investigation into how technologically mediated symbolic-image systems help human beings survive and process destabilised worldhood under conditions of grief, caregiving, and cognitive collapse.

The project demonstrates that recursive image systems may function as:

cognitive events
affective infrastructures
recursive symbolic mediators
externalised perception
and survival structures.

AI does not become human. But it reveals how profoundly recursive, distributed, environmentally scaffolded, and non-mechanical human cognition already was.

And Phantom Mirror increasingly becomes one of the places where this shift in understanding is being made visible through artistic practice itself.

APPENDIX

Positioning Phantom Mirror Within Contemporary AI Art and Research Practice

Current Trends in Contemporary AI Art and Research

Current AI art discourse largely operates across several recurring areas:

1. Prompt-Based Authorship

Many artists and theorists remain focused on:

prompting as authorship
prompt engineering
machine creativity
and ownership and attribution.

2. AI Visual Culture and Infrastructure

Another major area focuses on:

datasets
extraction
platform capitalism
AI labour
environmental cost
and algorithmic visual culture.

3. Phenomenology and Embodiment

A growing field explores:

embodiment
perception
AI-mediated experience
and phenomenological responses to AI-generated imagery.

4. Psychoanalysis and Symbolic Systems

Some recent work investigates:

mourning
symbolic instability
grief technologies
recursive symbolic processing
hallucination
and AI desire structures.

5. AI and Creative Process

Another area examines:

collaborative creativity
recursive experimentation
artist-machine interaction
and posthuman artistic practice.

What Makes Phantom Mirror Distinctive

Several aspects appear to distinguish Phantom Mirror from much current AI-art discourse.

Caregiving as Embedded Phenomenological Fieldwork

Most AI-art discourse remains speculative, conceptual, or aesthetic. Phantom Mirror emerges directly from sustained lived engagement with caregiving, cognitive destabilisation, grief, and recursive mourning.

Recursive Image Cognition

Many AI-art practices still operate primarily within:

prompt → image

structures.

Phantom Mirror increasingly behaves through:

image → image → image → recognition

This shift toward recursive image cognition and image-dominant iteration appears relatively unusual within current discourse.

Psychic Snapshots

The project’s concept of psychic snapshots — images functioning as fragments of cognition becoming visible during emergence — offers a distinct contribution connecting:

photography
temporality
affect
recursive cognition
and psychical externalisation.

Technologically Mediated Phenomenological Narrowing

The concept of technologically mediated phenomenological narrowing, emerging through both AI phototherapy and dementia-related FaceTime observations, appears especially distinctive.

The project suggests that technologically mediated systems may reduce phenomenological complexity sufficiently to permit symbolic-affective processing under conditions where embodied

collapse of worldhood.

Image-Thinking Under Affective Pressure

While current AI theory increasingly discusses image-thinking, Phantom Mirror investigates recursive image cognition specifically under conditions of:

grief
caregiving
existential destabilisation
recursive mourning
and collapse of worldhood.

Artist as Navigator

Rather than positioning the artist as sovereign author or passive prompt-user, the project increasingly positions the artist as navigator moving recursively through unstable symbolic-image systems.

Phantom Mirror: AI Phototherapy, Recursive Image Cognition, and Technologically Mediated Phenomenological Narrowing

Expanded Master Research Development and Positioning Document

Eliza Stephens – Practice-Led PhD

Introduction

Opening Position

Caregiving, Dementia, and Altered Worldhood

The FaceTime Phenomenon and Technologically Mediated Phenomenological Narrowing

technologically mediated phenomenological narrowing

The Bedsheet Image and the Origins of AI Phototherapy

AI Phototherapy, Five Deaths, and Psychic Snapshots

psychic snapshots

Victor Burgin, Psychical Objects, and the Chester Encounter

Flusser, Mira Schendel, and the Reversal of Image-Thinking

Joanna Zylinska, Image-Thinking, and the Artist as Navigator

the artist increasingly functions not as author but as navigator

Recursive Cognition, Neuroscience, and Sedimented Meaning

Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Altered Worldhood

Psychoanalysis Returns

The Art Itself

Current Dissemination and Next 12 Months

Final Position

APPENDIX

Positioning Phantom Mirror Within Contemporary AI Art and Research Practice

Current Trends in Contemporary AI Art and Research

1. Prompt-Based Authorship

2. AI Visual Culture and Infrastructure

3. Phenomenology and Embodiment

4. Psychoanalysis and Symbolic Systems

5. AI and Creative Process

What Makes Phantom Mirror Distinctive

Caregiving as Embedded Phenomenological Fieldwork

Recursive Image Cognition

Psychic Snapshots

Technologically Mediated Phenomenological Narrowing

Image-Thinking Under Affective Pressure

Artist as Navigator

Suggested Reading and Research Engagement List

Joanna Zylinska & Yanai Toister

LF Baldwin-Ramult

M. Shahnazarian

GF Marshall

SK Choi

A. Ballatore & F. Ballatore

Shane Denson

F. Cassata

K. Sri Takshara & G. Bhuvaneswari

MS Khokhar & M. Ayoub

Jones, Gupta & Ritchie

S Tei

L Ge

TWL Hsu

S Opeiko

Share this:

Like this:

Related

Leave a ReplyCancel reply

Discover more from Alien Familiar Art