Querying the Ghost: AI Hauntography in NIME

The discourse around creative AI is populated by eerie and otherwordly presences, often evoked by artists to reflect on the social and cultural paradoxes that this technology embodies. This tendency of AI art to bring forth the uncanny, emerging also in my design and performative work with NIMEs, echoes the methods of an artistic movement known as sonic hauntology. In this paper I elaborate on Derrida's and Fisher's notion of hauntology, a theoretical framework investigating ontology's liminalities, and an artistic current addressing the paradoxes of postmodern aesthetics through the magnification of the technological uncanny. I then apply this paradigm to creative AI, arguing that the model's algorithmic manipulation of the training data reproduces and exponentially accelerates the processes of temporal and semantic flattening that characterise postmodern aesthetics. The frictions produced by creative AI as it operates with and within the culture bring forth hauntological disjunctures, that artists might harness as an instrument of critique, and scholars as a novel epistemic method. Finally, I introduce AI hauntography, a practice-based methodology combining artistic practice and observation to investigate the phenomenological aspects of creative AI as they intersect with the broader technical and sociopolitical discourse.