Duty Free Art. Hito Steyerl

Walter Benjamin’s “optical unconscious” has been upgraded to the unconscious of computational image divination.²⁵

      By “recognizing” things and patterns that were not given, inceptionist neural networks eventually end up effectively identifying a new totality of aesthetic and social relations. Presets and stereotypes are applied, regardless of whether they “apply” or not: “The results are intriguing—even a relatively simple neural network can be used to over-interpret an image, just like as children we enjoyed watching clouds and interpreting the random shapes.”²⁶

      But inceptionism is not just a digital hallucination. It is a document of an era that trains smartphones to identify kittens, thus hardwiring truly terrifying jargons of cutesy into the means of production.²⁷ It demonstrates a version of corporate animism in which commodities are not only fetishes but morph into franchised chimeras.

      Yet these are deeply realist representations. According to György Lukács, “classical realism” creates “typical characters” insofar as they represent the objective social (and in this case technological) forces of our times.²⁸